"This is about how you think!"

Ryan Farinas talks about his journey to becoming a Product Designer.

Ryan Farinas, Product Designer at Facebook.
Previously UX and Interaction Design at Apple. Lead Design, UX, UI at Glassdoor.

Ryan did not go to design school. He went to 5 other schools and got 3 majors in 4.5 years. He studied everything from agriculture to atmospheric science to music. He has a degree in journalism. He toured as a professional musician during the 90’s following his passion. He owned a coffee shop in the food industry. Was an Audio Engineer recording symphonies, audio books, podcasts and bands. He has a lot of interesting experience outside of design. The important thing is that he uses this experience in design everyday.

3 Areas Where Ryan Learned His Craft:

Street Art - Being a graffiti artist taught him about colour, craft and detail. Layering and scale. Everything that he uses is product design today.
Letting go - The most important skill you need to learn as you are working with people, getting ideas and exchanging ideas is learning to let go of your own ideas.
Pay attention to people - Everyone you meet has at least you thing they are really good at and they can teach you if you invest time in that person.
He draws experience outside of design everyday. Because they show him different ways of thinking. “It's about how you think”. There’s never just one way to solve a problem. There is multiple solutions to solving a problem.

What is Product Design at Facebook?

Tech companies like Facebook, Airbnb and Dropbox have begun to say that they need designers to be generalists. They look for designers that have skills in interactive design and visual design for mobile and web products. An important thing that they do at Facebook is “Product Thinking” which is a fancy term for problem solving. Facebook is not a design first company or an engineering first company but a people first company.

Design Process

Research > Sketch > High Fidelity Comps > Prototype > Feedback > Adjust > Launch. However in Facebook this rarely happens. It will be crazy busy at times, so remember to schedule some time to think. Go for a coffee break. You start to build things and at any point you can go back to the beginning. It’s a non linear process. Every-time you will fall down and you will fail. Especially when you are dealing with 2 billion people and all the data coming in. Even after you launch you will need to go back because you weren’t able to launch everything you wanted to. Launching is part of understanding the problem. You learn some more every-time you launch.

The 4 Phases of Creativity

In software building the four phases are Understand, Create, Build and Launch. However at Facebook this is rarely followed. Sometimes you can go from Understand to Launch. Skip Create and Build if you understand the problem. The process is non-linear and you should be too.

Pages on Facebook

Details matter. Data is not always what it seems. But data is always right. Pages are business profiles on Facebook. 80+ million active. They are very powerful. They include organizations, charities, dog pages and celebrity pages.
“Humans of New York” facebook page is about a man who had a goal to take 10,000 pictures of people living in New York. The photographer added a link to a business. However the page was not very good to the business. It failed to support any business needs. People where hacking the page and putting their own messages on it. The page was also very Facebook focus and not very business focused. The call to action was buried. It was hard to find out more about the business. Or what is “Humans of New York” all about. Facebook set out to make the page a powerful place for any business or organization. Ryan and a team of engineers worked on it for over a year and made the page more valuable to the business. This included:
• dynamic cover photos
• clear calls to action
• business overviews
• navigation to details
• feedback about responsiveness
At launch messaging was -3%. This was a huge disappointment and problem. The redesign was still better so they needed to fix the problem. They later found the problem was a “.” in the code. It had changed the colour of the text and had a massive impact. After the fixing the problem messaging was up 70%. Success! This is product design at Facebook.

The 3 Takeaways from Ryan:

1. Mental Models. Study and working outside your domain will make you better at everything you do.
2. Process in non-linear and you should be too.
3. Small things matter in really big ways.

Ryan's final advice is to foster an environment of ideation in how you think. Focus on HOW you think. Not what you think, it’s how you think about it that matters. Set yourself up to have competing solutions constantly battling in your mind because ideation is a process of inner debate. It’s also a model on how you can run your team. Invest in people. Build trusts and good relationships so you can actually debate with each other. That’s how you get the best answer. That’s how you get the right answer. And lastly always try “your sure it wont work?” Because that is where you will learn the most.

To learn more about Ryan Farinas visit www.ryanfarina.com