Get to know Team Design
The Design team is responsible for the user experience and visual design of the Moneybox iOS and Android apps. Their aim is to empower our users and design an app which is easy to use, yet enjoyable and meaningful.
How big is the team and how is it structured?
There are currently 10 designers in the team, ranging from UX/UI specialists, growth experts and end-to-end product designers. The team come from a range of backgrounds and have a variety of specialist skills between them, including illustration, design operations, copywriting and animation. We operate across the “mission” structure at Moneybox, so each designer starts off as a generalist and is assigned to a specific mission, like Home-buying, Saving, Investing or Retirement, following a successful 3 month review.
How do you get design feedback?
While we all operate across different missions, we work together regularly and critique each other’s work to ensure our product stays consistent. Every Friday, we have a longer design “show and tell” style meeting to share and discuss ideas we want feedback on that require more explanation. Come prepared, though! These sessions are our chance to provide helpful context to the wider team and get specific feedback.
What are your processes like?
Our designers work very closely with the product management team and our developers. Within our missions, we all work to 8-week sprints called “orbits”, which are much like the OKR process — a core set of objectives and key results we want to achieve within them. Although our product managers generally define these projects, as designers, we’re responsible for the work we deliver and keeping on top of the performance data following a feature release. We can then recommend different prioritisation or improvements to a shipped feature if we feel the performance is outside of our expectation.
Do you have a design system?
Absolutely! We obsess over our design system and have a dedicated team of three designers who work on it alongside their mission objectives. Although any design in the team can contribute back to the system, we ensure our maintainers are the “key holders” who keep things neatly organised and reliable. We work across iOS and Android, so we have a design system that’s both flexible and specific to each platform. In order to improve maintainability and consistency, we use shared assets where possible and only create or use unique platform-specific ones if we need to. This means we can reduce the likelihood of platform segregation or design debt. In order to maintain consistency with development, we’re in the process of updating to a model of using design tokens, to ensure colours and components follow a consistent and reliable naming convention.
Which tools do the team use?
We’ve just completed a big transition over from Sketch to Figma as our main design tool of choice. This allowed us to take a step back from how we’d been organising our files and design system, bring over the best bits and start fresh with the rest. Figma acts as our handover tool too, as we can let our product managers and engineers in there when we’re ready. As this is part of a larger transition, we’re still utilising Overflow and Zeplin for certain handover situations.
How do you conduct research and get user feedback?
We have various different ways of gaining user feedback, depending on what we want to test. Although we’re biased, the majority of us are all Moneybox customers as well, so we have an amazing alpha test bed for any ideas. Thankfully, our entire company wants the best for the product, so they don’t hold back on feedback! After that, we have our shareholders and all our customers. We often prototype and research ideas with them through testing platforms such as Maze.
Do you use tasks in the interview process? What are these like?
We do and that really helps us to assess a candidate’s skills when it comes to their design thinking and application. While we understand that all projects are different and a task can’t always reflect the actual design process, it means we can assess your ability the best we can in that moment. We won’t ask you to do free work via a task that involves the Moneybox product and go on to use that work in our app. Instead, we’ll ask you to evaluate an existing product you use regularly, provide feedback on areas you think could be improved, then demonstrate how you’d go about improving them.
What are the learning opportunities like?
At Moneybox, every day is a chance to learn! We all align our daily activities to our company ALOT values, and learning is the ‘L’ in ALOT. If you have a specific skill, knowledge or insight that you want to share to make us all better, then go for it!
How do you work effectively with the Engineering and Product teams?
As a design team, we work extremely closely with Product and Engineering across everything we do. Our Product Managers and Engineers are comfortable with being shown concepts that range from extremely experimental, all the way through to high-fidelity, finished articles. We regularly showcase our work across Design, Product and Engineering, so we’ve built up a great relationship of collaboration and flexibility. As a team, we don’t get wedded to ideas and we expect that these are fluid concepts that need to change depending on feedback, but thanks to a robust set of processes, we can always guarantee the result is one we’ll all be proud of.
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