Dalia Research is a startup. A lot of different work has to be done. This is not a classic “design lead in a large company” kind of work. It’s more of a Swiss Army knife kind of work. Even considering the company is small, it consists of 4 different companies: Caspian, Latana, Yuno and Dalia as a head company. All of them are interested in Brand, Communication and Product Design. This is a story of most interesting projects at Dalia in 2019. I split the annual list into two parts:

I. PRODUCTS

• Yuno Panel
• Survey Interface
• Reports Dashboard

I. PRODUCTS
—

First year mostly worked on Yuno Panel, Survey Interfaces, a bit on Dashboards and Internal Tools (we have around 12 of them, yeah).

Yuno Panel — share an opinion for reward.
Survey Interface — interface where we get people's opinion all over the world.
Dashboards — the place where we (and our B2B clients) analyze results of those surveys.
Internal Tools — all microservices we use internally, from setting up projects to generating audiences JSON.

On March 15 we launched Yuno Panel that we worked on since mid-January.
Yuno Panel is about getting people's opinion for small reward.
We needed it as our own publisher, to have access to certain audiences when we need them, to back up b2b demand.

We all had a long war on name. With several "frameworks", final pools and rethinking. It took about a month, considering we started with "Lock Team in a room, get good name in 10 minutes" mentality.

My colleague Niels designed logotype, pallet and came up with some typography, I took care of product and communication design — panel interface, landing page and marketing campaigns.

We also quickly built micro-site for those who are interested in becoming a partner for Yuno.

After launch, we started testing and experimenting with different ideas, features and surveys:

• Tests and implementation of additional profiling
• Better notifications
• Help Center to lower the support
• Blocked user page to talk with fraud
• Offer wall to give user a choice
• Multiple price points to find value
• New publisher outreach deck to communicate better with partners
• Communication materials for external publishers
• Email Templates and several marketing campaigns

The whole road we never forgot to talk to our users, so we held regular remote interviews, as we are interested in global audience.
Our customer support Ben organized a daily "user pain points" report, that help us a lot with prioritizing our roadmap.

By the end of 2019

• 1M registrations
• Became 3rd publisher in terms of the number of completions
• Each week we are rewarding 450 users
• $60K in monthly revenue

Survey Interface
Surveys are the core of Dalia. This is the place where b2b business lines get all data from. Here is how it works in general: a person plays a farming game, and they need half a cow. So the app offers them to buy a cow for in-game currency, or take a survey and get that half a cow as a reward. Of-course things are way more complex than that, but this is enough for general understanding.

At first, we rebranded and slightly restyled old system (previously called SpeakUp). We called it Yuno, to gradually erase lines between the survey interface and our Panel.

Around April together with Frontend developer Anna we formatted the guerrilla team and rewrote survey interface technically and made tons of tiny design improvements that everybody never had time on. Two main reasons to do that were:
1. Every change was pricey. This is blocking product growth. We need to change architecture to be able to grow.
2. Technologically, the system was old. Hard to hire people, hard to motivate to work on product.
3. This seamed the only way to get consistency across large and complicated system.

So we started it as "Let's make Tim better at Frontend" and ended up replacing system's Frontend with our work.

We presented our work in July, and in November we started connecting our system with production. We gradually launched new survey interface system with AB test from country to country mid-December.

Here is the version for the January 2019

Surveys Offer Wall was also quite interesting because we designed it entirely with code. I used survey interface we developed (see "Showroom" in "Initiatives" part) as a full fidelity prototyping tool. Eventually came up with two links to fully working prototypes for testing. And passing work to development was as easy as pull request.

REPORTS
DASHBOARD

In RD field, probably the most interesting work was done designing a Deck. Existing dashboard worked "one question per screen". We developed a functionality of having a front page or "Deck" where custom charts are being displayed together for a high-level overview.

II. TEAM AND INITIATIVES
—

There was no team, so we started everything from scratch.
To communicate with the company we created Slack Channel and Team email design@ To communicate between each other we started weekly meetings. We needed a shared information space, so we started creating wiki type of documentation in Notion.

But we still were just two, so we hired one Product Designer (John) and one Junior Communication Designer (Deniz). Hiring was rough. Tons of shitty resumes and portfolios were seen and weird workshops held. We also hired UX Researcher, but did not get along.

Design awareness in the company was so-so, so I started Design Related Documentation to store FAQs, Processes, Structure, together with design related screencasts and public speaking materials.

We also wrote team and personal descriptions to set up our boundaries and job responsibilities.

We tried to fight waterfall. I wrote a detailed process to set up a transparent project queue from different parts of the company. Then we gradually applied it to our daily life.

Moved Team from Sketch to Figma to collaborate with rest of the company more openly.

Sometimes I had too much work going on, so I hired a small design agency to help with communication materials.

Ohohoh! And I mocked a cool 🎬 reel, showing what the design team was up to in Q1. Desperately want to show it, but it's NDA.

I  N     I       T    
I      A      T        I        
V          E          S

I wanted to erase bridges between design and development, so together with Frontend developer Anna created a tool called Showroom.

Showroom had two goals:
I. Become a developed design system, the style source of truth, available for everybody in the company.
II. Become a prototyping tool for designers to design survey related projects with code.

So any project in survey interface field is designed directly in code with ability to create multiple full fidelity prototypes on real data, to test with actual users, and get the cleanest data possible. Later we implemented our code to production. The code that frontend developer and designer wrote secretly, for 6 months. I could not be more happy.

Considering not all designers are familiar with basic frontend, I also organized all design elements in Figma. So it's easier to pass work to a new designer.

NotNow
By the end of the year, got some time to get back to my 2-year-old dream to do human availability dashboard. Was bugged with "Is my shit ready? And now? How about now?" thing, so started a small pet-project. The purpose is to have a link that shows your availability and tracks progress over time. And is hiiiiiighlyyyy customizable. Probably will talk about in 2020 post.

And finally
was asked to draw
a boat picture once.

They didn't like it