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

10.26.2015 - By Prescott Perez-Fox & friends Play

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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

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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

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InVision, and their blog

Lo-Fidelity/Hi-Fidelity design

"Fail fast but also learn fast."

—Alice Chan

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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

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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

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

—Kitty Chan

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Show Your Work by Austin Kleon on Amazon

Steve Gordon, and his Instagram feed

Prescott prefers Kanban Boards over Gantt Charts

Matt Cutts

HelloKittyChan.com

Kitty Chan on Twitter

Kitty Chan on Facebook

Kitty Chan on Instagram

Kitty Chan on Dribbble

Kitty Chan on Pinterest

Kitty Chan on LinkedIn

AliceChan.design

Alice Chan on Twitter

Alice Chan on Facebook

Alice Chan on Instagram

Alice Chan on Dribbble

Alice Chan on Pinterest

Alice Chan on LinkedIn

Procurify on Twitter

Procurify on Facebook

Procurify on Instagram

Procurify on YouTube

Procurify on Dribbble

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