According to the ICRIAP of the Republic of Kazakhstan, there are more than 14 thousand IT companies in Kazakhstan in 2024. With the development of IT in the country, the role of design is also growing. Because design is a business tool, not just beautiful pictures. Through design, a business communicates with a person and involves them in interacting with the product.

In this article, Roman Iminov, a product designer at the Kolesa Group, will talk about his work, the necessary skills for beginners, share a case and give useful recommendations.

I create user-friendly and aesthetic interfaces in the Kolesa product.kz, helping millions of people buy and sell cars. My task is to immerse myself in the problem as much as possible, and based on the data, develop a scenario that will give people a positive experience of using the product, and business profit. My tasks also include developing and improving the design of the system.

A product designer is a specialist who creates interface design that covers user needs and fulfills business objectives. This is a relatively young profession in the IT market of Kazakhstan.

Hard skills

- UX (User Experience) is the user's experience in an application or on a website. Use different services every day and analyze what actions are convenient for you to perform in them.

- UI (User Interface) — user interface, visual. Evaluate the interfaces and analyze why they are aesthetically well implemented.

- UX Writing — the text content of your design project. The text should be clear so that the user knows where this or that button leads him.

- Research — it helps to understand user behavior. It is important to systematically compare hypotheses and the idea of the ideality of your product with the user's reality.

Soft skills

• teamwork: designers interact with managers, analysts, researchers, developers at every stage of creating a feature/product;

• good presentation skills to be able to "sell" your design;

• Receptivity to feedback;

• the ability to ask questions;

• empathy.

In addition to "hard" and "soft", it is useful for designers to understand the business. You need to know the audience of the product, understand the value of the product from the business side and understand the needs of users.

All these skills help not only to create convenient and useful products, but also to grow in grade, increasing their value in the market. Here's how it works for us at the Kolesa Group: product and graphic designers have a grid of grades from junior to senior. Our methodologies, tools, and grade growth are similar to similar systems from developers. Thanks to this, the specialist has a clear growth roadmap.

Let's see how all these skills are applied in a real case.

Updating the submission of ads in the "Spare Parts" category in Kolesa.kz

Problem

89 people out of 100 submit ads in the "Spare Parts" category. This is not enough.  Moreover, the number of successful ad submissions is a key metric for us.

Goal

Increase the number of successful ad submissions.

How the work was built

1) We understand the business.

Let's find out what "Spare parts" are in Kolesa.kz are in the top 2 categories in terms of the number of ads. We analyze product metrics.

2) We analyze the submission of ads in spare parts at this stage.

We find out how convenient and beautiful everything looks in the application from the user's point of view. We understand that there is an outdated design and there are elements that are not used.

3) We listen to users. 

We receive feedback from the research team. They talk to users and identify their pains and needs. We find out that users are missing some parameters, and their ads are often rejected because of an incorrectly specified category.

4) We analyze competitors.

Analyze the design and functionality of other services. We transfer our conclusions to the design project.

5) Creating a design for user testing.

We make the most convenient and beautiful project in Figma, prototype it, write understandable texts. Next, we give the project to the researchers, waiting for their conclusions and feedback.

6) Generate the final design. Taking into account the feedback from users provided by the researchers.

7). We present the design.

We are connecting soft skills for the presentation. We calmly accept feedback and ask counter-questions.

8) We give it to the development.

After the developers, we make a release and look at the result.

9) The next stage of development is post—production, when we observe what happens to this feature. If you need to revise a feature and rebuild it, it all goes back to the design. This is how product development lives.

Result

1) It has become easier for users to submit ads.

2) The number of successful ad publications increased by 3 percentage points.

What does this mean: if from the entire audience of "Spare parts" in Kolesa.kz take a sample of 100 people, instead of 89 people previously, now 92 out of 100 successfully submit ads in this category.

At the start of a career or when changing jobs, a designer needs a portfolio. I recommend doing a case study. Unlike a portfolio, which is more about visual, case study presents you better as a professional. Because it describes the design process itself - layouts are necessarily accompanied by descriptions. 

What to write in the case study:

1. We give introductory notes: we talk about the project, show the goal and our task as a designer.

2. We talk about current problems: we identify the pain of users, what problems there are in the interface.

3. We write what has been done to achieve the result: we conducted an analysis of competitors, studied important parameters for the customer, compiled CJM and user portraits, etc.

4. We show solutions: your visual and a description of it.

5. Here are the results of user tests: for example, 10 out of 10 users have successfully completed the path of creating an ad and noted that the new parameters are really convenient and useful to them.

6. We give the results: as a result of the task, the number of successful publications increased by 3 percentage points.

Important: use the pronoun "I" instead of "we" in the case study, because this is your portfolio. Teamwork skills are great, but it's important for the employer to know exactly what your contribution is.