Discovery

Communication is key

The kickoff for any design project, whether it is a single feature or an entire design overhaul, starts with a meeting with key stakeholders to establish the underlying business goals and objectives. What are you hoping to accomplish with this new design? If it is a redesign, what issues do you believe the current design has? How will you define success and measure it once the new design is implemented? It is critical to understand stakeholder expectations and ensure there is a shared understanding from the beginning in order to successfully execute the design project.
 

DESIGN by numbers

The next step of the initial discovery is to review any existing metrics such as usage data, errors or abandonment to validate the beliefs of the team and stakeholders. Do the numbers support the team’s belief about existing user behavior? Do they indicate potential issues with the current design that the team is unaware of? An initial analysis of the existing metrics can help to guide initial discussions with the users and provide another data point to supplement the stakeholders’ assessment of the situation.

Research

DIVe DEEPER WITH THE USER

Now that we’ve established a starting point, we can approach users from a more informed position and most likely uncover deeper and more meaningful insights. At this point, we would conduct surveys, focus groups, or 1-on-1 sessions to better understand who the users are, what their existing process looks like using the current design, and how their needs can best be met. Often these sessions are a bit less structure than task-based usability testing, as we want to allow the user to guide us. By giving the user freedom, we are likely to learn far more than if we only sought to validate our existing assumptions.

Map the process

In analyzing the results of our sessions with the users, we can start to document what we have learned in the form of user personas, a customer journey map or user flow diagram. These will serve to inform our information architecture and design thinking going forward, and be valuable tools we can refer back to for the remainder of the design process.

Cultivate A SHARED UNDERSTANDING

At this stage we would come back to stakeholders and the larger team as a whole to share findings. We began this process with assumptions and existing knowledge from the team, supplemented by some initial analysis of the usage metrics. Now that we have qualitative feedback from the users, we can share the bigger picture and reconcile any disparities between business objectives and user needs. By coming to a mutual understanding of the user research, we can best prioritize where we spend our effort and get buy-in from the full team prior to starting the design phase.

Design

Build the blueprint

Next we will begin the design ideation, seeking to convert what we know about the user process into an actionable solution to meet their needs and the company’s goals and objectives. From the customer journey map, we will start by building out the information architecture for the site, so we have a framework to serve as a guide for the actual design. We may seek to get additional user feedback or analyze additional metrics as needed throughout this process to validate our thoughts and assumptions.

Sketch early and iterate often

Along with the IA, we will begin to develop low-fidelity sketches as the starting point for creating our design. The goal at this stage is to explore a wide range of potential solutions quickly. We may employ other activities such as card sorting to help identify design opportunities. As the concepts are refined, we will develop higher-fidelity mockups or clickable prototypes depending on whether we are testing layouts or user interaction. This process should be one of continuous, iterative improvement with a frequent feedback loop to ensure the designs support the business goals and the user research.

Validation

We’re not our users

This is the point at which many people make the mistake of thinking, I’ve done my due diligence and now the design work is done, right? It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that our knowledge and understanding of the users gives us the ability to make accurate predictions about what will meet the their needs. Instead, at this stage, we need to test our proposed designs through individual, task-based usability testing sessions. By observing actual users completing their work on your clickable prototype, you can go beyond theory and identify pain points before getting too far down the road.

PUTTING THINGS IN CONTEXT

Once we have gathered the user feedback, it is important to supplement to understand the greater context. Getting the user’s perspective on the design is valuable, but it is important to independently evaluate what the user says with their actions. Qualitative feedback can be paired with metrics such as task completion or error rate, and this can help to mitigate the user’s inherent biases. The cycle of design revisions and validation can be repeated as needed until the design is ready for implementation.

Continuous Improvement

Monitor the Metrics

Once the design phase is completed and implemented, it may seem like you can just move onto the next feature. However, long-term monitoring of the metrics once the redesign is released is necessary to ensure that the findings of the usability testing translate to the larger user population. There may be other factors that were not present in the user testing that still need to be accounted for, so it is critical to continuously monitor for signals that there are still user pain points to be addressed.

Look at the bigger picture

The design of one feature does not exist in a vacuum. It is important to periodically complete end-to-end usability testing on the full application. This will give a broader scope than individual feature testing and can reveal previously unknown issues. Additionally, changing one feature will potentially impact another, and sometimes that can only be learned when testing the application as a whole.

Final Thoughts

It is important to remember that at the center of this process is the user and their needs. We often measure success of the user experience in terms of reduction in errors, elimination of pain points and user satisfaction. The quote below from Jared Spool reminds us that a user satisfaction is minimum goal, and we should strive to go beyond mere satisfaction and craft a design and a user experience that delights the user wherever possible.