🔍 Articles in This Section

Please use the following list to see additional internal articles regarding Gem Extension:

• (Internal) Design at Gem (📍you are here)
• (Internal) Gem Design Principles
• (Internal) Gem Brand Guide and Resources
• (Internal) Gem Product Personas
• (Internal) Color

You can access this document at any time by going to go/design in Chrome!

Dig in and if you have any questions or suggestions you can reach design on Slackorreach out to Melinda Kilner directly.

Table of contents

1. What is design at Gem?

2. What does design do here?

3. How to work with design

4. Where to learn more

1. What is design at Gem? TL;DR

Gem design is a recognized world-class design team that works closely with cross-functional peers to identify, lead, contribute to, and create a shared vision around product opportunities. The team drives user experience initiatives and enables teams at Gem to rapidly ship product experiences that consistently receive customer praise as well as meet measurable objectives.

Our role as designers at Gem is to drive success across the entire, end-to-end user experience alongside engineers and product managers.

User experience design—or “digital product design”—is the practice of creating goal-driven, user-informed products or features through product thinking, visual design, and interaction design.

Think of user experience as the complete experience an individual has when interacting with Gem’s software. Everything from the sign-up flow to an email notification, even the help center, account settings, and marketing pages, are part of the user experience.

The design team’s responsibility is to ensure thatthatexperience—any touchpoint across the Gem product—is of a high, consistent and reliable, quality. We rely on a set of product principles to help us align efforts toward this quality bar.

Curious about how the Gem design team will scale as the company grows? We have a doc for that: +Scaling Gem Design

Design is more than just how something looks…(Expand this section to view more)

Note that our responsibility as designers at Gem is not just the visual or user interface (UI) of the user experience. A common mistake is to think that design is just how something looks. It’s much more than that!

Building out the UI is just one facet of the work we do in design; the other responsibilities we have encompass defining and designing the user journey, conceptualizing interaction flows across pages and features, helping define product strategy and vision, creating a clear language to use across our product, and more.

For a great overview of how we think about product usability, check out this resource from the stellar Nielsen Norman Group.

2.What does design do here?

Here’s how we define and prioritize what we do for design at Gem today:

50% transforming the user experience in ourproduct.

• Improve experiences for customers by ensuring high-quality design, including ownership of all front-end interaction points (eg. company website).
• NPS sentiment tracking
• Task flow usability evaluations
• Customer interviews and feedback
• Delivering a consistent, seamless, and cohesive experience across Gem.
• Product audits and reviews
• Follow a clearly defined product design process
• Foundational UX tasks
• Conducting and participating in user research, including sales calls and customer success sessions.
• Ongoing customer conversations
• Usability tests, surveys, and unmoderated feedback studies
• Reviewing sales and support calls regularly

25% driving design change across Gem.

• Drive design standardization across Gem—including branding and marketing collateral—by creating a common language and set of practices, regular design reviews, and training sessions.
• +Gem Design Principles
• Gem Design Open Office Hours
• Representing design throughout Gem, including creating presentations for board review or for providing regular updates at company all-hands.
• Gem slide template
• 2021 vision video
• Conduct cross-functional design training programs and insights workshops.
• Gem Design Lecture Series
• Lunch/brownbag learning sessions

25% building a world-class design team.

• Build and maintain a globally recognized design team.
• Publish designs on our team Dribbble
• Publishing insights and lessons via Gem’s EPD Blog
• Create award-winning designs
• Represent Gem’s brand at functions and in press.
• Public speaking and conferences
• Interviews in press and as part of panels
• Develop design team skills, supporting the team through regular conference visits, workshops, and courses.
• Attending conferences such as In/Visible Talks, AIGA, and more
• Individual Personal Development Plans

3.How to work withdesign

Because design touches the entire end-to-end user experience of our business and product we must work in collaboration with many other functions at Gem.

As such, we prioritize being pulled-into (orpulling others into) projects early and partnering with engineering, product, customer success, sales, marketing, and other teams before anyofthe work really begins.

If you have something that needs design’s attention, reach out on Slack in the #design channel or ping any member of the design team. Because we’re a small team, we like to stay in close-contact, and if your request or question is better suited to a different member of the team, we’ll help route it accordingly.

Additionally, we have a few existing places to get in touch with us or hear about our latest work:

a. Design Office Hours

Every Thursday at 11am the design team invites anyone in the company to come and present work for design feedback and discussion. This is a chance for non-designers to show their in-progress work and get feedback on it.

Please sign-up to share work, discuss ideas, or ask questions by using this Google sheet.

b.Monthly All Hands Update

Each month design will provide an update in the company all hands to share top-level initiatives or interesting projects/insights.

c. Ad-hoc and one-off conversations

…are very much welcome!

Design can work with you to:

• Define and document product strategy and direction
• Create wireframes or user journey maps for specific features
• Test concepts with users in order to evaluate an idea or change
• Sort through conventional wisdom and research-backed data to inform decisions
• Produce and walk-through pixel-perfect compositions for implementation
• Create interactive prototypes to demonstrate an idea quickly
• Ensure a concept is easy-to-understand and follows Gem design standards
• Review work and collaborate through brainstorming to level it up

Some tips for working with design

• Include design early and often!
• Even if you think a conversation is too technically focused or not defined well enough, the earlier you include design the earlier we can start thinking about the user experience.
• Leverage design for more than UI.
• Designers are often exceptional at problem framing, scope definition, and feature ideation. It’s good to work with design on the visuals of something, but the visuals of anything are only one small part.
• Elbow design if you aren’t seeing our process enough.
• Design is only ever as good as the diversity of perspectives that go into the process. If we’re not transparent it means we aren’t getting your valuable feedback and insights into the work we do. If you aren’t seeing enough of our process, please elbow the design team and ask to see it!

More to come!

4. Where to learn more

Documentation

• +Gem Design Principles
• +Research Project Getting Started Guide
• This Dropbox Paper folder contains all design-driven documentation.
• View the 2020-2021 design roadmap here!
• Design research is now logged here in Google Sheets
• +Gem Design Interview Process is a doc outlining the design interview process

Elsewhere

• Figma is where you can find all of our work (log-in using Google SSO)
• Asana is where we track ongoing projects and tasks
• This Slack channel is where we provide feedback and regular design updates
• Each Friday we host Design Review, the agenda is shared here: +Design Review Monthly! Agenda

• Table of contents
• 1. What is design at Gem? TL;DR
• Design is more than just how something looks…(Expand this section to view more)
• 2.What does design do here?
• 3.How to work withdesign
• a. Design Office Hours
• b.Monthly All Hands Update
• c. Ad-hoc and one-off conversations
• Some tips for working with design
• 4. Where to learn more
• Documentation
• Elsewhere