A Look Inside Design at Zappos

We're tracking down InVision users inside the world's most amazing companies to discover their favorite tools, books, methods, and the philosophy behind what makes them so awesome. This week we interviewed Donny Guy, a User Experience Manager at Zappos in Las Vegas.

What are the top 3 essentials in your workspace?

1. Whiteboards: At any moment, you can have inspiration and it’s a little easier to have a whiteboard than to carry around a moleskine or something like that. That’s why some of the office’s rooms we have are actually white board painted. You can literally write anywhere.
2. Collaboration: Definitely need to collaborate with everybody. As a UX designer, you’re really trying to get the whole company to have the same thought process. If you try to lock down the ownership, you’re not doing your company any justice. You want to get to the point where you’re really doing the bigger, deeper dive experiences and thought processes and then let the whole company start figuring out some of the specific experiences themselves based on past history or data.
3. Open-Mindedness: Designers need to be open-minded: a great idea might sound like a bad one at first. You just gotta have an open mind that maybe there’s something new, and maybe there’s a way of being better. Here at Zapposwe just re-did a product page that does some things that are out of the e-commerce norm, and InVision played a huge role in the research we did. Based on the research, we found it made more sense to almost hide the product description. It is not the first thing you see because we learned that is not what our customers want. We had to ask ourselves, "Why are we trying to push this description piece when really a huge percentage of orders happen without a person even looking at it?" So we developed a hierarchy of what our customers want: they want images first, then they want to look at videos, and then they’re looking at reviews. And all of these things were higher importance level to the user than the product description, which doesn’t seem like a norm among other e-commerce sites. A lot of that stuff you just need to be open-minded to.

How important is your workspace to your creativity?

I think it’s really important. My desk is located over in what we call Shanty Town. Everyone has spilled into the aisles and a mix of disciplines are all crammed in there but I think the bonus of that is that I don’t have to send an email or walk across a building. We’re all right there, which allows us to collaborate better. Being able to have people really close to each other so they can have these quick interactions is really key. You can solve things much quicker.