Evolution of Apna’s candidate app design & its team practices
Throwback to our design growth
The Intro
It was Apna’s 3rd anniversary and we were witnessing a company-wide expansion & restructuring for its new revenue milestone 🎉.
After a successful stint with my previous community product, I was expecting a team change & here it was — I was the new design owner of the newly built Growth vertical of Apna!
Until my new team was ready with its product roadmap, I decided to clean my old Figma files… but what I saw next was nostalgic ❤️😊. Going through the old designs was so satisfying to look back & see how Apna’s candidate side designs had evolved over the 3 years.
Witnessing this evolution & growing along with the company right from scratch… I felt proud! 🫡
When I joined…
Our design team was just 4 months old. It originally had just 3 folks & when I joined, I was followed by 2 more interns.
The roles were muddy, processes were vague, requirements were not precise and everything was in a constant iteration mode, which was reflected in our designs.
Things changed a lot in 3 years…so to understand this evolutional journey, let's break them into 3 phases:
🔥 ️Building a Design System
🤔 Cultivating the Product-Thinking culture
🍰 Self-Reliant Phase
First, things first: Building a Design System
🔴 Understanding the Problem:
We didn’t have a design system, which meant there was no consistency overall. Design components were either copy-pasted from some others’ files or were created locally.
While the GTM designs were done by an Ahmedabad-based agency, I felt they failed to do it properly before handover— no library, WCAG-violating colours, icons, font family and that too without any documentation.
Since the team was small, every designer had to cater to multiple products. Allocating bandwidth for the design system seemed hard. I myself was looking into 3 products in my initial days 🥵
🟢 How we solved it:
We needed someone who could dedicatedly work on building us a design system...long story short, Piyush couldn’t see us struggling & decided to join us 😭. (thanks Piyusss!)
⭐️️ The Efforts Began (Sept. 2021)
👀 Observing inconsistencies in our already live designs — font-weight imbalance, different hex codes for the same colours etc.
✏️ Keeping a note of the same components but using different designs, including different interaction transitions for the same UI at different instances.
😎 Taking inspiration from the major design systems in the industry.
⚛️ Following the atomic design principles: building foundational, component & template level scalable design components.
✅ Presenting this library for a stringent Peer-Review session & incorporating changes.
⭐️️ ️️️️Apna Design System - ADS (Dec. 2021 — Present)
Spearheaded by Piyush, everyone contributed. Apna Design System today is an extensive library with documented details & the use-case for every element. Even I got a chance to contribute to documenting the UX writing guidelines & interaction states for our system.
⭐️️ ️️️️The Clean-up Began (Dec. 2021)
Once the design system started taking shape, the first thing we did, was spot inconsistencies - different visual styles for the same element, designs violating WCAG, different figma components for the same element etc. & re-designed them according to our newly designed ADS.
Once this was done, we prioritised them, divided them into different sprints & discussed with product folks to spare considerable bandwidth for these Design Backlogs. While this took considerable time across design charters, we knew we were on the right track.
Phase 2: Re-looking into the Product-Thinking process
🔴 Understanding the Problem:
At least now we had a library; it significantly increased our designing speed by 50%. Now comes the 2nd issue- Not just our design team was new, but so was our product team.
Quick & dirty way of working worked initially, but this resulted in confusion & delays when both the task & the team grew bigger.
📣 No PRDs & just verbal communication for certain requirements resulted in confusion & lack of ownership.
⏳ Quick requirements with fewer ETAs resulted in non-scalable design decisions with no scope for peer reviews.
🧑💻 Involving tech peeps just before the design handover resulted in going back and re-looking into user flows based on their inputs.
🟢 How things changed:
The improvements were gradual, but we were able to fix every little flaw in our process.
⭐️️ ️️️️No PRD, No Work (Nov. 2021)
Not only did we insist, but we (design folks) sometimes resisted working without detailed PRDs & the excellent part is even we started doing proper documentation of our design decisions.
Not only that, even design got a chance to lead product decisions & initiate DRDs (Design Research Documents) for design features.
⭐️️ ️️️️Design Sprints (Dec. 2021)
While the product followed the Sprint cycles for development, the design team needed to get ready with the designs before the sprint began.
Thus, Design sprints ran 1 sprint before the product sprint. We not only got enough time for our research, explorations and open-design meets but also for peer-review & usability testing with users.
⭐️️ ️️️️Open House Design Meets (Jan. 2022)
The design took the initiative & started the practice of Open Brainstorming Sessions soon after we got new product requirements, involving all the stakeholders (dev, QA, product, analysts & design) & welcoming their inputs.
⭐️️ ️️️️Peer Review Sessions (Feb. 2022)
There were no Quick Requirements anymore. Not only did we give ETA estimates but we also kept enough time to do the internal Peer-Reviews before presenting the designs.
Phase 3: Self-reliant Phase (Adding cherries to the cake)
🔴 Understanding the Problem:
Things were shaping up! We were enjoying the recent changes in the team’s work but the team aimed for something more (all thanks to Piyusss!). We needed the KICK!
While it’s difficult to define, let’s see what we did in this phase👇
🟢 How we solved it:
We decided to change certain ways of working, increase efficiency & ultimately save time by trying some extra learning initiatives. This was all done to satisfy our KICK-o-meter!
⭐️️ ️️️️Design Tickets (Apr. 2022)
The tech team used Jira tickets to keep track of their allotted tasks, progress & available bandwidth. We (design folks) thought of trying it out too…Yes! Jira tickets for design tasks as well.
We were still using Google Sheets to track the design progress till that time so we decided to increase our efficiency. Unlike what tech used, our ticket was specially customised to contain all the important links required for the task — PRD link, parent Jira ticket link, Design link & whatnot.
We didn’t get surprised when the dev asked for the Design Ticket rather than the Parent Ticket for reference!
Our peer review sessions proved quite fruitful. It helped us double-check our designs before handoff. We were doing great & others should know that & that was important! 😅
So as a step 2, we did two more things:
⭐️️ ️️️️Design Newsletters (Aug. 2022)
Started publishing a monthly Design Newsletter with a brief note of what phenomenal work we did that month & believe me! That really worked. Here is a glimpse 👇
⭐️️ Apna Design Talks (Oct. 2022 — present)
Started organising Design Talks inviting designers from various design-matured companies & shared tips-tricks, and insights as to how to design more effectively. While these talks proved successful, we learnt a lot.
⭐️️ ️️️️UX Measurements (Sept. 2022)
While we were busy building our product, it was significantly important for us to verify whatever we were doing, we were doing it correctly. We divided this into 2 parts- conducting a charter-wise evaluation & doing it for the overall app.
The individual design owners had the freedom to choose the evaluation method & what exactly they wanted to measure. For the overall app’s usability, we went ahead with SUS.
We had worked hard on the overall app experience, we were happy to see the erstwhile app’s SUS score of {}
While the journey continues…
Some other initiatives & milestones are either WIP or yet to be released publicly. We even launched Apna for the Web (users don’t have to download the app to apply for jobs) & Community 2.0 (a new way of professional growth with direct contact with brands & influencers).
From just a 3-membered team to a strong 15+ product designers we’ve come a long journey — design ownership, design-thinking, teamwork & a lot more!
While we’re constantly evolving both technically & practically, there’s is more to come. So stay tuned ya peeps…!!!
Thanks for reading it to the end! Hit the clap 👏 button if you like it.
Have a project to work on or just wanna say hello, ping me at kartikeys.design@gmail.com
To know more about my work, follow me on Behance or visit LinkedIn.
