The Busy Creator Podcast with Prescott Perez-Fox: How Kitty & Alice Chan Helped Build Procurify's Design Team

How Kitty & Alice Chan Helped Build Procurify's Design Team - The Busy Creator Podcast 70

Oct 26, 2015

Kitty Chan (@IMKittyChan) and Alice Chan (@AliceChan319) are twin sisters and co-workers at Procurify, an online software company based in Richmond, BC, Canada. The duo work together within the design team at Procurify, and have originated many of the company's creative workflows and protocols, grown the product and marketing offerings from the ground up, and installed a healthy creative culture.

In this conversation, we discuss how the sisters came to work together at Procurify, some of the early creative challenges faced by a small software company, and what sort of workflows and rituals you can use in your own company to help create order and harmony.

Procurify is an online tool to aide companies in their purchasing and procurement. Check them out at Procurify.com

Show Notes & Links

Alice and Kitty are UX/UI designers
Procurify helps businesses with their procurement processes, to help businesses buy the stuff they need
The design team is only three designers, so everyone wears multiple hats
Procurify began as as school project for three students at BCIT
Kitty was the first designer, with Alice leaving her "corporate startup" to join about 6 months later

"We know how we both work. It's very easy to communicate."

—Alice Chan

Tweet This
Challenges at the start concerned process. A lot of trial-and-error.

"Don't bake a giant cake; you might not like the flavour. Bake a cupcake first and taste it."

—Alice Chan

Tweet This
InVision, and their blog
Lo-Fidelity/Hi-Fidelity design

"Fail fast but also learn fast."

—Alice Chan

Tweet This
Adrienne Stortz runs xoxocooks, her cooking show on YouTube. She'll like our cooking metaphors.

"Our design team is in the center of everything."

—Kitty Chan

Tweet This
Kitty & Alice (and their third designer) work on marketing, sales, and lots of other elements.
"Two Pizza Team" — keep it small enough to feed everyone with two pizzas
Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson on Amazon and on Audible

"Boss is a four-letter word."

—Prescott Perez-Fox

Tweet This

"[Our office] feels like a community center sometimes."

—Kitty Chan

Tweet This

Show Your Work by Austin Kleon on Amazon

Tools

Procurify
InVision
Smash Bros.
Whiteboards
Trello
Wrike, and its Gantt Chart feature
Sketch, over Photoshop, for interface design

Techniques

Product Owners should bring in Designers from the start to create a feature
Define a "development workflow" which breaks projects into smaller chunks
Publish-and-iterate, not just in app/software design
Move the Design Phase earlier to decide on features. Don't build things before they've been planned.
Take care to ensure consistency across apps, marketing materials
Have a company scrum every Friday to showcase what you've during the week
Upload your work to Dribbble as a team
When moving from design to development, show your thinking in InVision and include images