#110 Alvin From Relab Studios: Designing The Perfect Website
Today's episode of The Ecom Show is special because it's the first time we'll be diving into the intricacies of product design.
We have Alvin Hermanto from Relab Studios here with us today to talk about everything that goes into designing the perfect e-commerce store. Relab Studios is a specialized design agency that helps e-commerce businesses design products like websites and applications by combining design thinking with UI/UX capabilities.
Daniel and Alvin met through YouTube as they're both YouTube entrepreneurs that share expert tips and strategies specific to their field. Daniel talks about his experience of running Budai Media, an e-commerce retention marketing agency, on his Youtube channel; he also shares tips and strategies to help other businesses scale. Similarly, Alvin Hermanto also has an active Youtube channel, where he teaches businesses about design thinking and product design.
Tune in to this episode to find out more about:
✔ How Relab Studios Began
✔ The 6 Stages of Designing A Website
✔ Design Tips From Alvin
How Relab Studios Began
Relab Studios is Alvin Hermanto's first business. It's a design consultancy firm that provides digital product design and solves design problems for e-commerce clients. They build and work with websites, applications, and other portals.
Growing up in Indonesia, Alvin had always been interested in design. Unsure about what to specialize in, he went to Malaysia and studied graphic designing since it was a broader field of study. His university gave him the opportunity to complete his course in Australia, which is where he earned his degree in graphic designing with honors.
Alvin began offering his services as a graphic designer almost 15 years ago. He worked with several brands and transitioned to becoming a digital designer during the time of the e-commerce boom.
It's been over nine years since Alvin started his own UI/UX design consultancy firm Relab Studios. They focus on an intersection between business and UX design or user experience design. Alvin's firm designs software websites and applications; they also share their expertise and techniques on their growing Youtube channel.
The 6 Stages of Designing A Website
Alvin has devised a six-stage design process to create the perfect website for his clients. These stages blend design thinking and agile design methodologies to create a website that truly represents their client's brand. The idea is to pay equal attention to strategy and user empathy to create a user-friendly experience through a collaborative process. Here are the six stages to perfecting your design:
- Understanding: Stage one is understanding the user, which is the end-user itself. But you're also trying to understand the business. And the way you would do this is by conducting interviews with different stakeholders of the business in the room. You do this to understand the vision of the business, future plans, needs, and expectations from the product. This is the most crucial step, as it forms a base for the rest of your decisions.
- Defining: You've understood the problem; now it's time to sit and define the goal of the product. This is done by outlining the premise to create a user strategy template, or a set of design principles, success metrics, the value proposition canvas, and solutions that will define all the needs established in the understanding phase.
- Ideating: This is where you start sketching solutions and start putting down ideas on what you want your product to look like. This stage is the most collaborative as it involves both the clients and the design team sitting together to put down ideas that they'd like to see in the product. It's basically a visual representation of all the thoughts and ideas that will frame the website.
- Deciding: The ideation phase involves jotting down all the ideas and thoughts that could go into the product. Stage four is where you narrow your focus down and shortlist the solutions you like the most. This stage involves voting on ideas and finding a winning solution. By the end of this stage, you usually have a blueprint of what your website would look like with your website flow and user journey outlined.
- Prototyping: This is the stage where you create your storyboard by sketching out what your product would look like on different screens. This can be done in a variety of ways. If you're comfortable with Adobe, you can create your entire prototype using tools like Figma or Adobe XD. If you're not a designer, you could use tools like Canva or even Powerpoint to illustrate what each page or part of your website would look like. This step helps you see what your end product will look like, and the perks of using Figma or Adobe XD is that your UI can directly be given to the UX designer to implement.
- Validating: The last stage is to conduct a round of objective user testing to weed out any kinks in your design. This step allows you to see how smoothly your user journey is in action and is an essential quality assurance step before you release your MVP for the world to use.
Design Tips From Alvin
Your product design is a true reflection of your brand's identity, and it's one thing that directly affects your relationship with your customers. Your user interface and experience shape the way your customers will interact with your brand as a whole; which is why it's important to remember to ensure that your digital product is in tune with your physical product. Here are some expert tips for Alvin.
- Do your research: Look at actual products you use in your everyday life, and observe how their digital presence ties back to their physical products. Find brands that you like purchasing from online, and observe how their design is creating a positive experience for you. For instance: Check out Herman Miller. They create high-end office chairs, but more than that, they serve their customers really well, from a customer service point of view. They've done this by creating well-segmented user flows to provide essential content in the form of videos and blogs.
- Create a holistic experience: Good design is something that goes beyond just looking or feeling good. It's about the holistic experience it creates for everyone that uses the design. So let's say we're designing a portal for a wine company, a wine distributor, then it also needs to work really, really well for their salespeople, customer service people, not just the end-user or their customers. So yeah, good product design is something that works seamlessly for every person that uses it.
- Try to be inclusive: Design is subjective, which is why it's best to have multiple opinions and make it a collaborative process. The ideal design team involves having a facilitator, a designer, and a decider. The facilitator is the person that holds the compass and navigates the direction in which the product design should be aimed at. The decider is usually someone who has a deep understanding of the brand and oversees all the ideas being suggested by the facilitator; the designer carries out the vision that's been laid out by the facilitator and decider.
- Hire someone who's empathetic: Ideally, a product designer is an individual who has a strong acumen for design thinking to back their experience in UI/UX design. They fuse their understanding of your business with design principles to create a product that matches the needs of your customers. If you can't afford to hire a product designer or product designing agency, look for user interface designers that have a strong understanding of how to solve problems. They should be able to understand and empathize with the needs of your clients to help you design a product that best caters to your needs.
If you enjoyed this episode of The Ecom Show, make sure to check out Alvin Hermanto's Youtube channel for more design and user experience expertise.
You can also check out his latest work on his website Relab Studios, or directly connect with him via LinkedIN.
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