“How to Turn around an Aircraft Carrier: Changing UX in One of the Russia’s Largest Online Companies”, Yury Vetrov, head of UX, Mail.ru (RU)
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How do you deal with user experience in a company that offers 40 different products on the web and many of these products have their own versions for mobile platforms? That’s the challenge they were dealing with in Mail.ru.
What is Mail.ru
Mail.ru was born on 1998 and is now part of a holding company known as mail.ru group which also owns Odnoklassniki and ICQ and has a large number of shares in Facebook, Zynga and other start-up companies.Yuri is the leader of their design team which is one of the biggest design and UX teams in Russia.
Starting off
Before you can start work on great product, you have to do a lot of routine work. The work process can get broken and you have to fix this asap
In 2009 design was called a strategic feature and in large companies there are a LOT of roadblocks which you have to constantly work with. Showing the Stefan Klocek model.
The main problem often is that you have deal with everything at the same time. Instead you need to break the problem down into smaller manageable pieces.
The other problem is the clash between product owners and agency designers. The main difference is in the mindsets of different designers.
The process gets broken because the people who make the decisions do not know how to manage this process in a good way and the first time is always very hard. You get hired, but you are losing credibility fast. This means that you need to rebuild the process the correct way as soon as possible.
Most important: the team!
You need people who want to do great things and you need them in order to gain quick wins!
The process:
- research
- concept
- UX design
- visual design
- support
- UX testing & evaluations
Flexible design process
Sometimes we are working on 2 versions at the same time. In order to do this we need designers who have trust and take responsibility. You do not just do mock ups, you are in charge of the product itself.
Only a designer knows what are the key decisions and only he can say why this particular design gets chosen.
Have T-shaped designers in your team.
A UX designer takes a lot of input from the graphic designer and he taking the role of a consultant. He is not creating thousands of prototypes and instead, he communicates with the higher-ups and supervises the overall process. Sometimes only a small input is needed to make a product great.
You can never hire enough designers and you will always have a need to outsource them. Sometimes you also need a fresh view and new ideas from people who have not worked on the product 24/7
Long-term planning
Use agile methodology. It helps us to run the process very quickly and keep the pace going for a long period of time.
Yuri finishes his presentation up with the message that in mail.ru, UX guidelines are often used as a unified base and should be important to all companies, no matter the industry they are in.
And now it`s time for the Q&A and a break for the writer...
