Creating a transformational change of a product or service experience requires strong company-wide alignment and understanding of the desired customer experience you’re trying to achieve. However, communicating a future idea, feeling, or experience that isn’t tangible yet is actually really difficult to do, especially across a large organization. A great way to do this is to use a product experience vision.

This information has been shaped through research and my learnings after failures and successes with creating experience visions over the past year. In this article, we’ll go through:

1. What a product experience vision is.
2. How they can be used. Why it's important to have one.
3. What they look like. Communicating the vision through a visual tool.
4. How to co-create an experience vision as a team.
5. The measure of success.

What is a product experience vision?

A product experience vision is a reflection of the ideal customer experience you’re working towards. They show us how users will experience the product by addressing known pain points or missing gaps without specifying the exact solution.

Sometimes the vision might seem boring or obvious, but if the current experience is disjointed and disconnected, by comparison just making the experience not suck is revolutionary.

5 years in the future is generally the ‘sweet spot’ for an experience vision.

If it’s too far in the future it tends to feel like you’re describing science fiction — unless you’re SpaceX. A vision that is too near tends to feel unachievable given current technology, resources, or engineering constraints.

Just remember, not all people are using the latest technology of today. There is usually a 3–5 year lag in adoption. So imagine that future vision is based on the advanced technology of today — but if everyone was using it now.

How can a product experience be used, why is it important to have?

A product experience vision acts as the ‘flag in the sand’ for the transformational experience you’re all marching towards.

As Jared Spool explains in The Experience Vision: A Self-Fulfilling UX Strategy, this ‘flag’ is used to set the same directive for everyone in the organisation. Everyone is “marching towards the same point of convergence, even if they’re starting someplace different…these marching steps are often baby-sized”.

This ‘flag in the sand’ product vision helps teams to —

• Plan and strategize the decisions they’re about to make and evaluate how they’re tracking along the way. Without it, you’ll have teams making decisions that stray further away from others, further perpetuating a disjointed experience.
• Generate discussion and speak to what your team is working on currently, and how it relates to the vision.
• Help customers understand what you’re offering and whether they should invest in a long term product relationship with you.
• Teams across the company can see how they fit into the bigger picture.

“Decision makers ask –What baby steps will it take to get closer to our vision?” — Jared Spool

What does a product experience vision look like?

Create a visual, memorable, and shareable story to show the future customer experience.

Storytelling is one of the most important techniques that humans have used since primitive times to pass on memorable knowledge to one another. When combined with imagery, this helps people align on a shared mental picture about what the experience looks like.

Communicating a product experience vision through a visual tool is a powerful way to —

Create empathy for the customer by depicting emotion and eliciting audience participation in the narrative at hand — Airbnb hired a team from Pixar to illustrate their experience vision. These were placed on display around the office for all to see. The emotive facial expressions and the fairytale-like illustration style encouraged the viewer to see themselves in the place of the characters and empathize with their situation.

Make a new experience easier to understand and visualise — Apple’s 1987 ‘Knowledge Navigator’ video shows a professor in his home office using a host of Apple products that did not exist yet — such as voice controls, and video calls. At the time, this experience would have seemed like science fiction but, three decades later, it’s clear that this vision had a big impact on the various teams working at Apple. It helped them see how they fit into the wider transformative experience for customers.

The video carefully kept the focus on the experience, rather than the exact interface or product being used — helping Apple communicate a new conceptual model and user experience that was far from the current day reality.

Explain a complex idea or concept in a simple and engaging way — In 2008, Google had artist Scott McCloud create a comic book, targeted towards journalists and bloggers, which explained the inner workings of their new product, Google Chrome. This comic book format helped explain a complex idea in an exciting, engaging, and viral way.

How do you create an experience vision as a team?

It’s imperative that the team who are building or changing that part of the product are directly involved in doing the customer research and co-creating the story. Don’t create something on your own and expect your team to embrace it — they won’t.

Over the past year or so at SafetyCulture, we’ve been experimenting with ways to create a product vision. We’ve found that the most effective approach was for each feature team to co-create their own vision. Keeping it small and making it themselves allowed teams to have more ownership. By contrast, attempting to create a single narrative for the whole company left us with a vision that felt too distant from our teams.

With several feature teams, you’ll wind up with multiple vision stories focusing on different aspects of the experience. We found these would then overlap across different features, which helped us find opportunities and work together to create a more holistic experience.

Our high-level steps for creating a product experience vision —

1. The whole team must participate in the customer research process.
2. Synthesize the research as a team to capture everyone’s perspectives and insights. The vision should be based on this.
3. Hold a workshop for the team to sketch and present their own customer narratives.
4. The team votes to select key moments that resonate with everyone.
5. Pull those moments together into a single narrative that everyone is excited about.
6. Polish and simplify.
7. Share it out to a wider audience, in a clear, and engaging way for those who were not involved in creating.

What is the measure of success?

The ultimate measure of success of a product experience vision is if people are using it, talking about it, and referring to it to make decisions. You should hear someone telling the story to someone else from memory.

Your new product experience vision can become a starting point for developing your next steps as a product team. It can inform your JTBD, generate ideas for features, and prioritise your roadmap. Ultimately, if it’s effective, you’ll be using it to guide your decisions together as a team.

Hey, thanks for reading! If you’d like to chat, reach out to me on Twitter — or follow me on Medium for more. In part 2, I’ll be going into more detail about how to run a product vision workshop in more detail. Stay tuned!

How to create transformational change using a product experience vision was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the Ray and Charles Eames film Powers of Ten, it begins with a shot of a man sleeping on a rug viewed from one meter away. The view moves out — revealing the city, the Earth, our galaxy until it reaches the edge of the known universe. Then it zooms all the way back in to show the cells on his skin, moving in even further to finally end inside a proton of a carbon atom.

The film highlights the power of changing focus. When your level of focus changes, the details, problems, and challenges will change along with it.

This same concept can also apply to the world of product design.

Designers need to zoom in and out of different levels of focus when designing a product. Abbey Covert refers to this in her lecture How to make sense of any mess as ‘applying different lenses’. This lecture inspired my teammate Timothy Greig and I to better define and document the different levels we find ourselves navigating day to day —

To create a successful product it’s important to understand each level and be able to effortlessly move between them.

If you’re only looking at the bigger picture, you’ll miss small details causing the issues. If you’re only focused on the small details you won’t see how the work you’re doing fits into the greater system and strategy.

Each is level interconnected, and each contributes to the overall success of the product. You need to see the forest and the trees.

↑↑↑↑ Ecosystem

The wider world that your product inhabits

Understand: Customers will always experience your product in the context of the world around them. The things that influence this environment are often completely outside of your control. Consider —

• Other products, services, companies or manufacturers — How might Google services work with Apple devices?
• Laws and government — How do city zoning rules interact with the emerging demand for co-living and accommodation? How can autonomous driving negotiate with current legislation?
• Different industries — Finance, insurance, travel, and technology. Is there a governing body in charge or do these self-regulate?
• Global trends or events — How might advances in human longevity affect the health insurance industry? How will the Covid-19 pandemic change the sharing economy?
• Your own products — How do the other products you offer in your company work together?

Design: You’ll design a product that fits into the everyday life of your customers, alongside the other products and services they interact with. Research into the wider ecosystem will help inform your overall product vision and strategy.

Outcome: This will help you make sense of the direction your product is going and identify new opportunity areas for you to expand into.

↑↑↑ System

The conceptual model of your product that you articulate to customers.

Understand: Here you’re designing a high-level conceptual plan for how the product works together as a whole system. This plan should reflect your customer’s processes and support their expectations about how your product will solve their problem.

“Oh, so this is like WhatsApp right?” — The user will interact with your product with the expectations of how a chat behaves.

Design: Strive for the best possible match between the user’s expectations and the conceptual model that you’re presenting. Conduct user research about —

• The outcomes they’re trying to achieve (aka the jobs to be done).
• The problems they’re trying to solve.
• What they’re currently doing to solve it (other tools, methods, hacks).

Outcome: A system that helps users achieve their goals in a way that makes sense to them. Having this foundation will help your product be easily understood and fit in seamlessly with the customer’s expectations. This forms the building blocks of the structure.

↑↑ Structure

How the product is structured in a tangible way to support the conceptual model.

Understand: Across the platform, you’re designing how you’ll organise features and content in a way that supports your plan for the system.

• What does the user think they’ll be able to do within each section of the product?
• Where are they expecting to find the information they need?
• Is there functionality you need to make available on some channels and not others?

Design: While there is still no specific interface design at this point, you’ll be defining your:

• Channel strategy — Consistent, continuous, complementary ecosystems.
• Information architecture — The structure and grouping of content. It’s all in the right place to support those key tasks and journeys.
• Terminology — Words that make sense to the user.
• Content strategy — The guiding concepts or rules for what type of content appears on what page.

Ensure you’re basing this on a strong understanding of the key tasks that matter to your customers. It is essential to test and iterate as you go to uncover the best approach — at this resolution try tree testing, card sorting, or modeling real content.

Outcome: The individual parts of your product or platform have the right functionality, terminology, and content. These all support the conceptual model, are recognisable and set up logical expectations for the user.

↑ — ↓ Journey

It’s here that we’re designing flows, not screens. The user’s journey sits at the heart of the scale.

Understand:

• What are the current steps in the process that the user takes?
• What is the end goal the user is trying to achieve with this journey?
• What is the ideal flow when using your product?
• What are the online and/or offline behaviours that need to happen?
• What are the opportunities, emotions, expectations, touchpoints at each step?

Design: You’ll create a visualisation of the stages that a customer moves through to achieve a task (not a specific solution for the interface). These can be expressed through different artifacts and used throughout the different resolutions to inform decisions.

1. High-level journeys:

• Journey maps — Map out the end to end experience based on research, highlighting opportunities to improve, their emotions, and needs.
• Storyboards — Visually tell the story of the customer’s problem and how your product will solve it. Show the ideal future experience.
• Service blueprints — Map the actions and systems required ‘backstage’ in order to deliver the desired customer-facing experience.

2. Specific user-level journeys:

• Task maps — The high-level steps a user takes to complete a single task, without guidance or prompts.
• User flows — Documenting the steps involved in a specific process, highlighting what they see, their available decisions and what they do.

The outcome: Teams and stakeholders will have a shared understanding of the customer’s needs and problems, and how your product will solve them. These artifacts will inform decisions both up and down the resolutions.

↓ Location

Key moments of your product are experienced by users in real locations and situations.

Understand: To create an effective experience you need to understand the different contextual factors at play. This will influence and inform your design decisions when creating an interface. Consider the following:

• What platform is being used? — App, mobile web, email, desktop.
• What is their physical environment? — An office, a building site, an unfamiliar city.
• What is their emotional or situational state? — Stressed, tired, gloves, low lighting, no internet access.

Design: Find the most effective way to help the customer achieve their task using the nuances of their contextual situation. Some examples include:

• Wearing protective gloves — Provide alternative interactions beyond the touch screen. Use hardware buttons or voice to text commands.
• Use in low light or full sun — Create stronger contrast ratios, allow for dark or light mode.
• Low internet coverage — Simplified UI and page loads. Only the necessities.

Outcome: A thorough understanding of context will allow you to create a product that fits into their everyday life. This will inform the design of an interface that is respectful and relevant to the context in which your customers actually use it.

↓↓ Interface

The arrangement of different interactions on a screen to form the interface.

Understand: The interface should be arranged in a way that is selective and harmonious. It’s from here that the user will be making a decision about what to do next in order to achieve their goal. Consider for your user:

• What are the core tasks they’re trying to achieve with this interface?
• What’s the relative priority of these tasks?
• How does that priority change throughout their experience?
• What are the common interface patterns they already use?

Design:

• Use familiar patterns — This will help them recognise how the interface might behave.
• Progressively reveal functionality — Don’t overwhelm the user with information that’s not relevant yet. Reveal crucial information just when it's needed.
• Use realistic customer content — Build and test with content that makes sense to the user.

Outcome: An interface that allows users to understand what it does and how to start using it. It has all the right bits (and no more) to help them achieve what they want to do.

↓ Interaction

The specific steps a user takes to accomplish a key task within an interface.

Understand: You’ve come all this way, don’t fail on the last few hurdles! You must consider the little, often overlooked, usability details that make each interaction achievable. Without them the user won’t be able to complete the task — your interface has made a false promise.

Design: Once you start unpacking the intricacies of an interaction, there are many details to consider:

• Leverage familiarity — Use interactions that are in your product already or ones that are in other products popular with your users.
• Perceived affordances — The function of something should be easily determined at a glance by its appearance.
• Mitigate for errors & edge cases — Help people avoid errors altogether, rather than having to recover from them later.
• Feedback, system state & responses — Use loading states, motion, colour or sound to acknowledge an action taken and reflects what is currently happening.

Outcome: Well designed interactions across your whole product will add up to the overall impression of the product. Is it enjoyable to use? Do I trust the product? Poorly designed interactions will make your users feel dumb. Never make them feel that way.

Object

A reusable component guided by set standards and used to assemble together a number of interactions or interfaces.

Understand: Singular ‘objects’ form the basic building blocks of any interaction or interface. These need to be consistent across your product so that it’s easier for users to recognise what different elements will do. You’re building a visual language for your product.

Design: The tiny details of the individual elements. This includes icons, grids, layouts, buttons, illustrations, colours, micro-interactions and more. Let’s use a button as an example, consider the following:

• Type — Primary / secondary / tertiary.
• Availability — Active and disabled states.
• Interaction states — Default, hovered, pressed, clicked, focused.
• Microcopy — Sentence case / Title Case / lower case / ALL CAPS.
• Touchpoint — An accessible size to press for the user’s context.
• Positioning — Side in which the primary button sits next to the secondary.
• Padding — The spacing around the text inside the button.

Outcome: Defining and standardising these components in a design system, will bring consistency to your product, and reduce the cognitive load for your users. Pre-defined design patterns will also save time for designers and developers when building the product.

If you’d like to chat, reach out to me on Twitter. Or you can follow me on Medium for more. Related read — Understanding mental and conceptual models in product design

The 8 levels of focus for building successful products was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Design is a quest to find the best possible match between the user’s mental model that they have in their mind, and the conceptual model that you’re presenting to them with your product.

These two models run through all resolutions of design — everything from developing a product system to crafting a single button. Understanding how they work together will help you design products that users can easily understand.

What is a mental model?

A ‘mental model’ refers to a user’s underlying expectations about how something should work. It’s formed based on what they already do, prior experiences with similar products, or by assumptions they’ve made based on how it appears (also known as perceived affordances).

Understanding and designing for a mental model involves uncovering a deeper understanding of the motivations, thought processes, and emotional state of your users — independent of your product.

For example:

• Booking a flight — You have a basic expectation of what steps you will take, and the information you’ll need along the way.
• A chat app — You expect that messages will go back and fourth in real time, and that you can also send attachments like photos and GIFS. You expect to be notified as soon as someone has replied to you.
• Driving a car — You have expectations of what the main things you can interact with are, what the car is capable of doing, and how to appropriately drive it in your country.

It’s important to remember that a person’s mental model is constantly evolving and subject to change. It’s influenced by new experiences with your product, other technologies, and day to day life.

While mental models are unique to each individual, you’ll be able to uncover common patterns in your customers. Identifying these at the start of your project will increase your chances of designing an easy to use and successful product.

The best way to do this is through common design research methods such as task analysis, observation and interviews.

What is a conceptual model?

A conceptual model is created by the designer as a high-level plan for how the product will work and fit together. It’s made up of different elements that shape the organisation of the system, and is ultimately represented in the interface that the customer interacts with.

Elements that contribute to the conceptual model of your product include:

• Information architecture — How are the different areas being grouped and structured? Where are your customers expecting to find the answers to their mental model within your product? Does that match their expectations?
• Terminology — Is the user familiar with the words being used? Are they broad terms that infer what you can do in each part of the product? How closely do they match the terms the customers use every day?
• Content strategy — What are the guiding concepts or rules for the types of content appearing on each page?
• Channel strategy — Are you creating consistent, continuous, or complementary experiences?
• Interaction models — Are you using well known patterns? Introducing something new? How are people interacting with the system?

You’re unlikely to be able to get these elements perfect the first time. You must validate and iterate on the elements of your conceptual model through testing directly with customers. The best way to do this is through card sorting, tree testing, concept testing, and usability testing.

If you ignore your customers’ mental models…

…users will feel frustrated when using your product. They’ll struggle to learn and remember how the system works. Ultimately leading to product abandonment.

It’s as if you’ve put the oven in the bathroom, and the shower in the kitchen — UX researcher, Dylan Mathiesen

Consider these worst-case scenarios:

• You’ve built an app without considering the customer’s mental model of your product — Most often this results in the information architecture reflecting a set of features, with no clear connection to each other. These features may each solve a valuable problem, but the user will need to work harder to complete the tasks they want to do. This is because the different parts of the system aren’t grouped in a way that supports the users expectations of what they need to complete a task.
• A new driverless car has been released and it doesn’t have a steering wheel — This car might be an amazing piece of technology that works better than all cars ever created, but it will be unlikely that the user will adopt it. The conceptual model is too far removed from the user’s current mental model for using a car.

How to build a strong conceptual model…

…consider these three approaches to increase your chances of success

1. Anchor your conceptual model in what your customers do today.

• Research and understand customer expectations first — Before showing interfaces, ask the user to talk you through the steps they take to complete the task. Observe what they do right now to achieve these goals, without your product. Base key journeys in your product on patterns derived from what your customers already do.
• Use terminology they are familiar with — Understand your user’s language. Don’t make up new wording that doesn’t mean anything to them. This helps your product be instantly recognisable.
• Leverage the interface patterns that they already use — Designing a chat experience? How is that usually structured? What products does this customer use every day? What sorts of interfaces are appropriate to the context your product appears in?
• Test early, and iterate — Keep testing your proposed conceptual model with your users. Test with realistic tasks that matter to them. It is important to validate and iterate early even before you have designs. Use techniques such as closed card sorting and tree testing.
• Re-evaluate the conceptual model at every step in the process— As you interact with other moving parts (technical constraints, business goals, roadmaps) your designs will evolve. Consider the impact of this evolution on the perception of your conceptual model. Reshape it as needed.

2. Introduce your customers to a new conceptual model.

How might you help the user model that idea mentally?

• Help your users relate to new concepts by basing them on familiar ones — When smart phones were first released, we saw the trend of skeuomorphic interfaces. Skeuomorphism mimics a real object’s interaction and appearance. Think, early UI of books, music players or notepads. If the user recognises the same model in a new place, it forms a bridge between your new idea and their world. You could also look to other interactions, ideas, objects or industry standards.
• Leverage a familiar model from the natural world — For example, Google’s Material Design system takes cues from the physical world and its textures. Elements of light, shadow and physical material (for the majority) are universally experienced.
• Use ‘perceived affordances’ — Explore different techniques to visually suggest the model’s function and how it should be used. We can subconsciously recognise the function of a mug just by looking at it. The shape suggests it could hold something, and its size reflects that it can be held in one hand.
• Show them how the product could be used through effective on boarding and marketing — Re-align their mental model through education. Use product videos to introduce the new conceptual model.

3. Introduce a completely foreign conceptual model by taking the user on a journey

“Everyone understands the need for change in the abstract, but people are creatures of habit. Too much innovation is traumatic, and will lead to revolt…respect the old way of doing things. If change is necessary, make it feel like a gentle improvement on the past.”— Robert Greene

• Have an end goal in mind, but break this down into considered stages to gradually influence the customers’ mental model — Imagine we have a new model of driverless car no longer needing a steering wheel. In 2019, completely removing the steering wheel will be too sudden of a change. Instead, we should be able to hide the steering wheel away when it’s not needed, yet its still there. Once people are more accepting of this concept, the steering wheel can be removed completely.
• Ideas are often ahead of their time. Sometimes you need a pioneer to prime the user’s mental model to new conceptual models coming in the future — In 2012 Google Glass was a revolutionary piece of technology, but it failed to gain traction. Users couldn’t figure out how to fit it into their lives. Google probably launched it knowing it wouldn’t be a consumer success. However, it primed our thoughts for the possibilities of the future. Those who finish a revolution are rarely those who start it.

Hey thanks for reading! Do you have any other examples or situations to share?…I’d love to know your thoughts in the responses below.

If you found this article helpful send some 👏👏👏 to help others find it too! If you’d like to chat, reach out to me on Twitter. Or you can follow me on Medium for more.

Understanding mental and conceptual models in product design was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Theres more to a 404 page than you’d think. A cute illustration might raise a smile but we need to make sure we’re actually helping the user with the pain points they’re experiencing in that moment.

Design isn’t only about pushing pixels and creating UI. How a sentence is constructed, what information it’s conveying and the choice of words can make a huge difference in the success of a task.

Each design situation should address the basic who, what, when, why and how’s + a few others.

1. Who caused the issue?
2. What happened & why did this happen?
3. When will this be solved? (Is it temporary or permanent?)
4. How can I solve this problem? (Actionable items or getting help)
5. Tie in the page with your company’s brand
6. Add unexpected delight

1. Who caused the issue?

Be mindful of the pronouns you use. Who’s actions are you referring to? Was it the user’s fault? The company’s fault? This will also help you determine whether you should say things like ‘sorry’ or ‘Uh oh!’ as your header. Let’s say it’s a maintenance page, use ‘we’ as it’s caused by the company, not the user.

2. What happened & why did it happen?

What is a 404? Why can’t it be found? An error code isn’t enough. We tend to freak out over things we don’t understand. So inform the user about what could be causing the issue. Keep it simple and authentic.

3. When will this problem be solved?

404 pages are a permanent state, while a maintenance page is temporary. So the information we’ll offer will be different. Inform the user about: when will it be back up? Was it scheduled or unexpected? How can I be updated when it comes back online? Sometimes there’s too many unknowns to be able to include this information in the hard copy. The best way keep people informed is by linking them to your active social media accounts.

“We’ll be back up shortly. Check ...com or follow… for updates”

4. How can I solve this problem?

So now they know what’s happened and why, but what can they do about it? Give the user actionable things to do through the copy and active links. Point them to a way out or to something else to keep them in.

“Make sure you’ve got the right link, or you could try searching for something else”

• Suggest new content
• Open search bar
• Primary navigation available
• Other popular page links.
• Home page link

“We couldn’t find the page you were looking for. Maybe our FAQ or Community can help?”

If your users rely on your site to get critical and highly consequential information, mitigate for emergency situations. For example, travel agents, government sites & healthcare. Include upfront information on how to get in touch via a different way.

“If you need help with an ongoing reservation or for urgent issues, tweet us at… or call us on… ”

Lastly, you can also ask the customer for feedback.

“If you got here from another site, we’d appreciate it if you told us from where so we can fix it and save others from ending up here”.

5. Tie it into the company’s brand or product.

This is a great opportunity to engage with your users. Utilising symbols of the company to reinforce brand. Facebook has used the like symbol as a broken thumb, and Etsy is craft based, so she messed up knitting her sweater, aw.

Sure, these are cute, but they’re also communicating what the website is about if you’ve entered it with little to no context. ie a broken link from a different site.

6. Add Unexpected Delight

Injecting an element of fun can transform a negative experience into a delightful one. If you want to go an extra mile, treat it as an easter egg. An Easter egg is an intentional inside joke, a hidden message, or a secret feature. Digital agency Kickpush uses confused Travolta- Amazing.

TLDR? Summary

Who caused the issue?

• Was it the user’s fault? The company’s fault?

What happened & Why did this happen?

• What is a 404? Why can’t it be found?
• Keep it simple and authentic

When will this be solved?

• Keep people informed

How can I solve this problem?

• Point them to a way out or to something else to keep them in.
• Mitigate for emergency situations

Tie in the page with your company’s brand.

• Reinforce brand
• Communicate what the website is about
• Engage with your users.

Add unexpected delight

• Transform a negative experience into a delightful one.

If you found this article helpful send some 👏👏👏 to help others find it too! If you’d like to chat, reach out to me on Twitter. Or you can follow me on Medium for more design articles.

• Part 2: How I Design & Make Leather Bags — Advice & What I’ve Learnt.
• 10 Reasons Why All Designers Should Start Writing More
• What the Hell Is ‘Team Culture’ and Why Is It so Important?

A UX Guide For Designing Error Pages. was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Answering your FAQ’s

Last year I posted an insight into How I Design & Make Leather Bags. Since then, I’ve received overwhelming support and questions from many kind and curious people. So I’ve decided to do a follow up. With more tips and advice shaped around the some of the most frequent, yet difficult questions I’m asked. For example:

“I have a vision, but no idea where to start, can you give me some advice?”

I’ll elaborate more on this in the FAQ section at the end of this article, but in the meantime, here we go. This is part 2 of leather bag making.

Before you get started

The whole process involves a lot of time, work & commitment.

But its worth it.

Don’t source out the ideation design phase for someone else to do.

Unless you’re famous, or willing to spend thousands. These are your creations, not the person’s whom you hired.

Don’t jump straight into the manufacturing stage without a pre developed design.

If not, it would be comparable to asking a builder “I have an idea for this house in my head, can you just make it for me?”. You’ll be wasting time and money, and might not get what you we’re imagining.

Get the ideas in your head down on paper.

Get them out on paper when the idea comes to you or when you’ve discovered a better way of doing something. They don’t have to be perfect, but its a tool of quick communication. Show, don’t tell.

Gain a basic understanding of construction techniques & patterns.

When you understand these foundations you’ll be able to take full advantage of whats possible to design and make. Plus, if this is for a business, you’ll need to know this so you can quality control your products. So learn about pattern making, stitching, attachments, processes etc.

Start off simple, then go more complex once you’ve gained a better understanding.

Not sure how the edges would join together? Try inspecting your favourite bag to see how it’s put together. Look to other examples of stitching & joinery.

Think big, but also know what your constrains and resources are.

Time constrains, money, solving a function, resources, designing within your limits. Design, as a profession is often shaped by many factors.

Prototyping & Development

Make Paper Prototypes, and let it be a volatile process.

Chop them up. Slash them. Drawn on them, and expect to make many versions of it to get it perfect.

Test it, hold it and remember to make it functional for popular use cases.

A few weeks ago I saw a leather backpack that would have been perfect for my commute to work. So, I pulled out my 15' MacBook pro to see if it would fit inside and it didn’t. So, immediately, it was a no sale.

Don’t skip this stage of the process.

Software & Details

Its worth using Computer-aided design software, also know as CAD.

Especially if your considering going into this business. CAD software makes the process of drawing patterns much quicker and easier. You can get exact shapes to fit together. If the paper pattern doesn’t work, its as simple as tweaking the drawing and re-printing it.

Theres a range of products out there. At the most basic level, anything that helps you draw a straight line, to scale, will work. I personally use AutoCAD. Other tools include SketchApp, the Adobe Suite, Rhino, Sketch Up or Solidworks.

• Rhino for Mac
• Free Illustrator | Download Adobe Illustrator CC full version
• AutoCAD For Mac & Windows | CAD Software | Autodesk
• 3D CAD Design Software
• 3D modeling for everyone

Construction Phase

Keep a notebook to track learnings & processes as you build.

This is great to keep and refer back to in the future or for the next iteration.

It’s ok to make mistakes… but don’t make stupid mistakes

Measure 10 times, cut once.

You might need to pivot the first few times you build it.

Even if you prototype beforehand, better opportunities or mistakes (hopefully not stupid ones) might appear. But thats ok, problem solve & iterate. Thats what design is all about!

Having the right tools will make a huge difference.

For example, you can’t use the same needle and tread you use for sewing clothes if your using leather.

I’m also limited to the basics, but a few of my essentials are:

• Stanley knife with a very good quality sharp blade.
• Cutting mat or surface
• Marble or steel block weights
• Various sized hole punches
• Stitching punches to create holes if hand sewing
• Steel hammer
• Steel Ruler (use when cutting)
• White Pencil for marking
• Zips / buckles / rings / any hardware you need
• Skiving machine
• Contact glue

Don’t have these tools or a workshop? Try using a public maker’s space.

Makerspace & Co | Leather working for Beginners

Frequently Asked Questions

1. I have a vision, but I have no idea where to start, can you give me some advice?

I noted this at the start, but I wanted to elaborate further because this is one of the most common question I’m asked. Yet the hardest question to answer. My advice? How long is a piece of string? — Don’t ask such a broad question!

With anyone you reach out to, always come with prior effort in learning and researching the topic. Thus, giving you more specific questions to ask. Which leads to a higher chance of gaining valuable help. If not, it insinuates that your looking to be spoon fed. You haven’t even bothered trying. Which is particularly a concern when the person has said that they want to get into it as a business. If you’re serious about it, then get learning! Read a book. Enrol in a class. Watch video tutorials. Read articles (like this one).

2. I have this idea in my head for a design I want, can you just make it for me?

Sure, but this would cost me an exuberant amount of time. Which I don’t have much of. Time = money. Thus, it will cost you an exuberant amount of money. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

3. Can you recommend any manufacturers or suppliers?

I don’t know of any sorry! I don’t use them and haven’t needed to look that far into it. You could connect with people who have created clothing lines by outsourcing overseas. They might be able to point you in the right direction.

4. Are you selling these?

No, I just create them as a side hobby. But who knows, maybe I will in the future! Right now I’m very happy working in digital product design.

5. If your not selling or wanting to do jobs for others, then why are you bothering with all this?

Constructing products in the physical world helps me exercise my methodical thought processes. It’s highlighted to me that design is all the same. You’re faced with constraints and restrictions. Along with the need to solve a core problem. Physical or digital, it’s just a different way of expressing the final product which I really enjoy!

If you found this article interesting or useful let me know with a cheeky 👏👏

Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, and follow me on Medium for more design articles coming soon. If you haven’t checked out part 1, you can read it here…

Part 1: How I Design & Make Leather Bags.

For the past year I set a goal to start writing more, to share my knowledge with the design community. Rather than bottling them up in private journals. Since doing so, I noticed new habits developing that turned out to be very beneficial in my design career. So the following points are ones of encouragement. Here’s 10 reasons why writing more will benefit you as a designer.

1. Reasons to talk to someone you normally wouldn’t feel comfortable to.

Writing will give you a reason to talk to someone that you might otherwise feel uncomfortable to approach. It could be a lead from a different department or even someone on twitter. Its a lot easier to approach people when you’ve got a specific reason to. For example, you might ask for their insights around something you’re writing about.

In my experience, people I perceived as daunting were actually very welcoming. If you’re sparking a conversation in their interests and showing curiosity in their knowledge, they’ll be happy and excited to chat with you.

2. Dribbble shows your style, but writing reveals your mind.

They say “a picture can tell a thousand words” but thats not always the case. Dribbble and Behance are fantastic channels to show your visual design skills and style, however this isn’t enough for UX.

UX is about your way of thinking, your processes and ability to work through what I like to call ‘non-sexy problems’. So write about it, reveal your mind to the world. You never know who might be reading. Someone who wants to team up with you? Potential future employers?

3. You’ll find yourself researching more into a breadth of different topics.

When I’m working on an piece of writing, I’ll usually fall into this infinite rabbit hole of googling. One topic leads to another, which leads to another. You’ll end up with an endless list of topics, articles and podcasts to absorb in your free time. This extra knowledge can spark new ideas down the track.

Tip: If you’re writing about something controversial or highly debated, it’s important to learn about both sides of the augment. This will help you make an educated and open minded comment.

4. Build trust and better communication with clients.

Even though design is a visual industry, writing will always play a vital role. Whether its writing a slide deck, a presentation, storytelling or emailing clients. Great copy will go along way as it shows competence and allows you to get the message across clearly.

If writing isn’t your forte, you can use text editors such as Hemmingway and Grammarly to check your work. The more you review your writing, the sooner it will become second nature.

5. ‘UX Writing’ will help your users.

Speaking to the point above, not only is writing useful for internal communications, but it’s a UX role in its self. Companies such as Google and Amazon employ UX writers. It’s their role to create copy that helps a user understand the task at hand.

Although, you don’t need to be exclusively employed as one to do this. Google has written wonderful guidelines for UX writing. Just having that knowledge will allow you to create better user experiences.

6. Connect with the design community.

Having a platform online opens up a new means of communication with people. Go ahead, have a little stalk of the people following you. Is there anyone interesting that you want to reach out to?

Did you really enjoy an article? Then tell them! Everyone deserves positive acknowledge for their efforts. That response might be the difference between them continuing writing or giving up. Continue to be active in discussions and engage with others.

Did a designer that you admire share your work or liked the post? Take that opportunity to reach out and say thank you. You’re allowed to fangirl over it. I certainly do!

7. It allows you to collate your thoughts in a formalised way.

Lets say you’ve scribbled down a few notes about a subject. These might be scattered across different sticky notes and pages in your notebook. Now this might not be for everyone, but I find formalised writing helpful. It allows you to collate your thoughts and document what you’ve learnt. Similar to what I’m doing right now…

8. It thickens your skin for criticism.

Its extremely hard to put yourself out there when making your work public. Theres always a risk that people may disagree with you or challenge your ideas. Yet part of being a designer is having the ability to handle criticism and take it in a constructive way.

Just remember, theres a difference between criticism and trolling. People will always say things online that they would never say to your face. Ignore them and power on with it.

9. Improve how and what you’re saying through editing, restraint and self critiques.

Writing improves how and what you’re saying, thought the art of editing, restraint and honest self critiques. What is the most value information to the readers? Whats necessary to say? What isn’t? This is useful when speaking to clients or replying to curly emails. The art of editing will also benefit your verbal communications. Lets face it, sometimes we tend to speak before we think.

10. Medium allows us to learn from others, this is your chance to give back.

I’ve learnt a lot from other designers sharing their knowledge and I’m very thankful for that. So I want to pass on the information I know to help others. This of course is easier said than done.

It takes courage to do so, and I think we all experience classic ‘imposter syndrome’ at times. But look at it from the perspective of releasing a product or showing the first iteration of a design. We’re always learning and improving.

I’ll leave you with this reminder.

You might feel as though writing isn’t worth it because there’s people out there who know way more than you. Although, there will always be people who know less than you.

The knowledge you share will be reaching at least one person in a meaningful way, so don’t worry. Write for them, and write for you. Write for the 10 reasons I’ve stated above.

I hope you got something out of this article. Please show some hearts if you enjoyed it and drop a comment if you’ve noticed any of these habits forming as well. I’d love to hear from you!

Twitter | Dribbble

While you’re here, check out these…

• 22 Things New UX Designers Should know Before Entering the Workplace
• Things You Can Do to Strengthen Your Design Team.

An insight into the design process and construction behind a few of my pieces.

I love the challenge of figuring out how somethings made. To me, it's like a big puzzle waiting to be solved, and when you do, the accomplishment and pride in your work is one of the best feelings.

From a young age I’ve always been surrounded by makers. On my mother’s side, my Nana was an artist and my Pop was an engineer. On my father’s side, my Grandfather was a leather goods maker. He used to design and make bags for Western Australian miners back in the 1960’s. This trade was passed down to my father, who is now passing it down to me. Which I’m immensely proud of.

For me, getting on the tools and crafting a physical object is a great outlet. Its nice to get away from the screens and technology that I’m surrounded with everyday as a UX Designer. To make a bag I follow the same process that can apply to any medium of design. These are the stages I work through.

Define the Problem You’re Trying to Solve.

While having something that is aesthetically beautiful is important, it’s imperative that you design with functionality first in mind. What is the core problem that you’re trying to solve? What is the missing gap that this bag will fill? Questions you need to ask yourself might be, what context will I be using this bag in? What items will need to fit into it? Where will I be taking it?

Case 1: The work bag

I always feel a bit awkward carrying around a backpack around in fancy bars after work. So I needed a bag that had the same functionality as my backpack, but stylish enough that I could take it out. For along time I had my eyes on a $4,000 Celine Bag. It was visually perfect, but it wouldn’t have fit my laptop or sport gear, nor did it have a longer strap. So buying it would have been pointless.

I decided to re-create it myself with a few tweaks to suit my needs. The size was designed to perfectly fit my belongings and a short clip on strap was added so that I could swing it onto my back like my backpack.

Case 2: The night bag

On a few occasions, I’ve found myself in need of a small black, simple shoulder bag to use on nights out. I drew from past experiences and problems I’ve had with going out bags. I knew that it would get dirty on the inside so I made the bag with plastic lining so it could be wiped clean. This, along with a zip closure that ensures my belongings are secure and won’t fall out.

Research and Planning

Leather hides aren’t exactly cheap, so planning your design will save you a lot of time and money. I’ll research designs that currently exist and take inspiration from elements that I like. I’m obsessed with the videos that show how designer brands make their bags. They’re a great resource because a lot of the time they’ll follow the same methods that you could do as well.

Prototyping

I’ll first begin by creating paper prototypes. For each model I make I’ll go back and forth tweaking the pattern to get the shape and size just right. The prototyping phase is a great time to make sure all the real objects you’ll be placing in the bag will fit.

Its also a good idea to wear the paper prototypes around to get an idea of the sizing and how it sits on the body. The image below is an example of me testing the true contents. My gym clothes and laptop needed to fit into it otherwise the bag’s existence would be worthless.

I’ll use paper to get the size, shape and pattern. Plastic to test the structure and cheap leather for stitching and joinery tests. Remember, this is a constant back and forth cycle. You’ll get to a point where you need to decide on a pattern to take into the creation stage.

Pattern Making

Pattern making occurs at the same time as prototyping as I refine and improve each design. I’ll create a more finalised pattern when I’m ready to translate it to leather.

I draw my patterns with AutoCAD, which is a drafting program I learnt during my time studying Architecture. With this program I can draw the pattern to scale with the exact measurements. I’ll also define things like: the location of the stitches, where holes need punching and how much overlay I’ll need.

Creation

Now for the best part — getting on the tools. Unfortunately, I don’t have much in the way of luxury hardware so I try to avoid the use of it where I can and let the functionality and form speak for itself.

As I’m making it I’ll jot down design notes such as: the order in which it was sewn together. How long the glue or edge coat takes dry and what sections I should have made first, and so on.

When it comes to the making stage, you need to have the right tools and machinery. You couldn’t use a fabric sewing machine as it wouldn’t be strong enough to sew through the thick layers of leather. I’m very lucky to have access to various types of machinery made for leather work. For example, a skiving machine thins down the leather. This allows you to create joins with a consistent thickness when you sew them together.

When something has been done wrong it’s best to just move on and keep making it. I’ll make note of mistakes, improvements or things I want to change for next time.

Iterate after using it in real life

After I finish a bag I’ll use it for awhile before I consider making a new version. This way I’ll discover things like construction defects and functionality issues. Along with how the leather has worn down and changed shaped. You may even find that you’re using it in a different context to what you originally thought.

I made two versions of this bucket bag. The first, was shorter and had no lining. After using the bag alot I realised that I couldn’t see the contents inside. So I created the second version with a bright gold goat leather interior. I also made it an inch taller because I felt the proportions were slightly off and my wallet was poking out from the top. Which isn’t ideal when your in public.

Learning From Mistakes

This is an example of a bag I started to make. The leather was too soft to maintain the structured shape that I wanted so I added stiffening to each piece. I soon learnt that I assembled it in the wrong order because it was too stiff. I couldn’t move it around the post sewing machine.

I abandoned this bag because I ran out of time to make a new one. As frustrating as it to ‘throw away’ something you put so much effort into, the mistakes you make are all valuable learning experiences. The things you learn each time can be used for in your future designs.

If you found this article interesting or useful let me know with a cheeky 👏👏

Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, and follow me on Medium for more design articles coming soon. I’ve also just added a part two 2, you can read it here…

Part 2: How I Design & Make Leather Bags — Advice & What I’ve Learnt.