Power of UX in Product Life Cycle
Why its Important to uphold the Spirit of UX across the Product Life Cycle.
Have you ever been in a Position as UX Designer or Product Designer fighting with your stakeholders trying to make them understand why conducting a Research would be Important before Getting into Design Phase? or Conducting Usability Testing is Important before Introducing the Feature into Market? Well, all i would say is .. you are not alone mate!
Perhaps Next time, When you get into such a scenario, you can try to give’em a short walkthrough on why it's important to uphold the Spirit of UX.
The tricky part is How you do that! Because, Yes! there can be lots of challenges
- Time Constraints
- Where to Start and How to Explain?
- What if people at the other end find it too Vague or out of their Subject?
- How to Co-relate the UX Methods in relevance with your Business Usecase & explain it with an example?
- Where to Stress Importance and where to Fastrack... so on & so forth!
One way of doing it would be breaking the whole process into smaller chunks like how its shown below and explaining Appropriate Methods we deploy based on the stage your product is in the Product Life Cycle.
Will make this scenario much more interesting by getting into the shoes of a UX Designer Who works for a Company where UX is not Implemented yet as a practice.
Persona 1: Very first UX Designer of a Company
It's a Tricky Situation, but trust me, you have an opportunity to
- Introduce UX for the Whole Ecosystem
- An Opportunity to Set Design Standards that are truly User-Centric
- An Opportunity to ensure Design Consistency across Digital Landscape.
- An Opportunity to create Framework of Reusable Components that can reduce hours of Development & Testing Efforts
- Finally What not, Create Design Interactions that are Seamless and Intuitive.
Taking a Step back to our question - How we can make stakeholders realize the value of UX is showing them what Bad Design can result out!
“If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.”
— Ralf Speth, Chief Executive Officer, Jaguar Land Rover.
What’s the point of creating solutions based on our assumptions without understanding Enduser’s expectation and then realize the Misalignments and then Re-Design — Redevelop- Retest — Iterate and repeat the whole cycle?
It's always important that you start your exploration of understanding End Users through Research. Always Empathize, Gather, Analyze & Synthesis our end-users Requirements.
If you are working on a project, Which is all set to kickstart, You can always suggest a Design Thinking workshop.
Benefits of Design Thinking Workshop
- From UX’ers Perspective, It helps us to understand Who’s my User, What he Do, How does his work life look like, what are all Digital Interface he/she Interacts with… et al.,
- What would be the different Usecases of end-user Using this Product?
- What are all the things does your Enduser likes to see as a part of Design Solution
- His/Her Pleasures & pain points.
Eventually, by end of the Design Thinking Workshop, you should also be getting to know about your Enduser as well as how to Create a Persona.
You will also, get to know What your Enduser feels about his Competitors or Similar Product in the market, What He/She Thinks that can be made better in the Product & Much more through the User Empathy Map.
If you are working on a project that’s already being released in the Market, You can suggest a User Interview Session with your existing end-user group.
Benefits of User Interview Session
- You get to Know Current Painpoints that your EndUser’s Face
- Feature that your EndUser Likes and areas that they think can be improved.
- Jot down Painpoints gathered and Categorize those pain points into Data Releated Painpoints & Design Related Painpoints that's related to Accessibility, Visibility, Navigation, Readability, and finally, Feature Enhancements.
Now that You’ve Got all the Requirements from the User, the Next Step would be getting into Ideate & Define Stage.
This is the Stage where we start Gathering Content as a Requirement, Create Information Architecture, Navigation Flow, Sitemap, Task Flow, User Flow.
One Way, how you can make Stakeholders understand the Importance of this stage is by Focusing on One aspect at a time, Starting with Content Strategy.
What is Content Strategy?
Content must be Leveraged in Such a way that It creates an Emotional Impact that leads to Behavioral change in Human’s Activity.
- Content is King! It's always important that when you create content It is Appropriate, Relevant & Useful.
I would like to explain the above by Comparing it with Popular B2C Application — Swiggy and how they Meticulously leveraged Content in their Design Solution that’s now being used by millions.
- Appropriateness:
Content Must be Appropriate in a way that, It stays Subjective!
2. Relevance:
Let’s say I'm going to Order a Chicken Biriyani, As a User, I may be very much likely to see the information Relevant to the food item that I’ve chosen.
Example:
- Food Sub-Items that Hotel provides
- What’s the Hotel Name
- What’s the Price
- What’s the Rating .. et al.,
What Swiggy has done here is that they’ve paid attention to details, crafted content in such a way that as an end-user, I'm able to view details related to
- Food Item selected
- Current State (Opened/Closed)
- Price of Food
- Trust Factor
- Offers/Rewards .. et al.,
3. Usefulness:
Lastly, Content Must be Useful in the way that, it should help the user to consume the Information and Perform and Action accordingly.
Secondly,
Information Architecture & Navigation Flow
Information Architecture is all about how you Organize, Categorize, Prioritize, Arrange, and show the Information.
Alongside comes Navigation Flow which shows how we can Implement Structure/Blueprint Obtained from Information architecture and put up in a form of a Flow or Sitemap.
Good Information Architecture makes User less alienated & suppressed by Technology. It simultaneously increases Human Satisfaction & Your Company’s Profit
- Jackob Neilsen
One way to make your Stakeholders understand the Value of Implementing Information Architecture, Navigation Flow, User Flow, or Task flow would be by taking any E-Commerce or Enterprise Application’s or Website’s Menu and by asking them to Arrange & Categorize menu items based on what they feel as an Ideal Order of showcasing Menu Items.
Here, I will take a Kindergarten School’s Website Menu as an Example. Here’s how the menu item look like
Let’s say we ask Management People who heads this Kindergarten to sort the Menu item in order they think would work.
Let’s say now, We call Parents of kids who are looking out to onboard their Kid into New Kindergarten and ask them what are all the things that you would be likely to see in an order of most likely to less likely.
As you see here, the Preference of Management’s Lens was different from End User’s Lens
As a Parent, He/She may lookout for a Quick way to contact Management once they get to know details about Kindergarten (About us & Programmes) and all they needed would be finding a way to contact them rather than showing galleries or a curriculum for 2-year-old kiddo.
Hence it's Always Important that We speak to Users and get their Preference, Gather Insights, Analyze, and then lay down the Structure to create an Information Architecture and from there creating Navigation Flow, Task & User Flow.
Benefits of Information Architecture
- Helps User to find the information in a much easier way.
- Allows Users to achieve the task in an Effective and Efficient way.
Likewise Its also Important we create User flow before getting into the Design Phase.
What’s User flow?
Humans Behaviour is Unpredictable.
What Screws us up Most in life is Picture in our Head of
How it’s Supposed to be.
You can’t design an Interface with one-dimensional thinking, expecting your Enduser to Interact and behave in the same way. If we do so, trust me, you may have to work a lot to catch up on things you’ve missed to cover at first. In such cases, User flow would be an Ideal practice to Implement.
- It helps you to Brainstorm, Identify, and visualize different possible ways that users would Navigate & Interact with your product and Features within it.
5 Elements of User Experience
Now that you have a Good Idea on
- What’s your End User’s requirement & Business Goals are
- Gathering all required Contents & Functional Specifications from your Product Manager and Stakeholders
- Creating Information Architecture & User flow diagrams.
The next phase would be Working on Interaction & Interface Design.
Persona 2: UX Designer Working at a Fast-Paced Environment
It's again a Difficult Scenario, Especially when we work for a Service-based Firm where It's Difficult to follow UX Processes as we run behind timelines, Sprints, and Submissions, Alignment with Client needs et al., Things may go crazy! but, that’s where your Experience should come into play.
Its Imperial as UX’ers you understand which Method to Deploy at what Stage depending on the phase your Product is in.
Doing Sketching before you start Designing your High Fidelity Screens is one such move!
Why Sketching?!
Sketching is a Phase where we Ideate Different Concepts for the planned Features & Create Different Approach for the same Flow. It's a Simple Practice that gives you Effective ways to Identify & Evaluate whether your thought process Solves the problem or not.
Some Suggested ways to Evaluate would be by Comparing two or more approaches aimed towards achieving one goal.
Let me explain it with an example. Let’s say you have an objective to design a Dashboard for Ola where the user has to perform the following actions to achieve their goal
Now, How you can leverage Sketching and Evaluate multiple designs designed with a single goal would be by evaluating
- Number of Clicks it takes to achieve a Goal
- Number of Transitions it takes
- The Total amount of time User spends or it takes for the user to achieve a Goal
- Number of Options being provided in One Single screen (Hick’s Law)
- Design Pattern & the Order in which Information is shown
Multiple other aspects can also be evaluated and measured which purely depends on the Concept you are working on and aspects you would consider for Evaluating it, which are Subjective.
The Final Phase Before Handover
Now Consider that you have your High Fidelity Screens in place, What’s Important is that you test your Product with your End-users before moving it to Development Environment.
Usability Testing
Major Reasons on why Usability Testing
- It's an opportunity where you can test and Evaluate whether your Conceptual Model Aligns with the User’s Mental Model.
- Designs that you’ve created by gathering your Enduser’s Needs aligns with his expectation or not.
- Whether User is able to understand the Elements used in the given Interface or not
- Whether User is able to understand the Functionality of the Designed Component or not
- Is He/She able to Understand the Interaction Planned as part of Flow or Not
- Is User Struggling at any Part? Is he getting Struck somewhere? Does he feel any flow being too cumbersome of taking too much thinking to perform an action?
Takeaways from Usability Testing
- Identify areas where the user has struggled
- Identify areas where the user has voiced out saying that certain things can be put up in a better or alternative way
- Identify areas which Users Liked the Most
What’s more important is How you synthesis the Insights Gathered.
Bonus Tip:
It's important that when the user has expressed a pain point, you collect the pain point along with the Suggestion or thoughts from the user on how else he/she would expect it to perform to achieve the goal.
By means of doing so, you solve half of the problem and the rest is how we make things easier & experience Seamless through Design.
It's time for Designer — Developer Handoff!
Out of Different Companies I’ve Worked, Different Companies had Varied approaches on Designer-Developer Handoff.
- In Some cases, Designer, Developer & Tester gather together where the designer walks through Design Features & Its Planned Functionalities starting from Element level to Component level and from there explaining its Expected behavior.
- In Some cases, Where Designer and Developer Work on Different Locations or If you are working in a very fast-paced environment or even in a company where these practices are not implemented yet. One of the Suggested practices would be sharing the designs through UI Slicings. Which is Basically Annotating every Element & Components, what not even organisms as shown below.
- In Some cases, the same can be achieved through tools like Figma or Zeplin or Invision or Abstract where a developer can be guided with Annotations using Comment Feature.
Some of the things to keep in mind before Design Handoff:
- Ensure Labelling & Namings area Relevant, Descriptive and Consistent
- Ensure you use Components (Icons, Images, Typography & Elements) that are part of the Design System and you are not Detaching or Unlinking it).
- If you don’t have a Design System, Use Icons, Images in SVG format so that they can be exported easily.
- Define a Styleguide with Basic Elements, that can ensure you maintain design Consistency across the ecosystem and your Digital Landscape.
- Finally, Have a Checklist & Sub-list for Every Module, which can be verified post Development and checked In/Out based on Progress.
Post Release of MVP
Now that you have Released your Product into Your Market, This is the phase where You & Your Product Manager will be working in tandem to Observe, Guage & Validate whether your product is a Market fit or not. In process of doing so, you will be performing the following activity
- Monitor the health of your Product through Analytics. Focusing on Daily Active Users(DAU), Monthly Active Users (MAU), Weekly Active Users(WAU).
- Measure & Validate your Ideas. Especially when you run a B2C Product, Eg: Cred. You may be likely to measure the Impact of Push Notifications, In-App Notifications, Email Notifications, et al.,
- Observing the Funnel to measure & Monitor Drop-In & Drop-Offs. Identify the Area to focus, Investigating, and Identifying Root cause.
Importance of Monitoring your Product’s Growth: The Story of Ola
I would like to explain it with one of the Real-time challenges that OLA Design team experienced in 2017–18.
Post Release of Product, OLA Experienced sudden Drop of their Customer rate by 40%
When they Identified this Sudden Drop off and dug in further to identify what has caused this through Funnel Results, they Identified that majority of User’s Dropped-Off in the Login Stage.
When Investigated further, They went on to Identify that these users were from Tier 2 and Tier 3 Cities & Reason for Dropoff was because of Users asked to Complete Captcha & Login Using their Mail IDs.
In 2017–18, the Introduction of Captcha was a bit of bringing in Westernization practice into the lives of people who were completely new to these practices as a result of which Users went Clueless & Dropped off!
Likewise, Signup through Email ID was also one such case where users would have also not created their Email Ids. In some scenarios, they might have not forgotten passwords or even email IDs.
So, Once they Identified the Root Cause, they spoke with their Security team and ensured that they applied Security only at the places where it mattered the most.
Post deploying these changes and releasing it on the next phase, they witnessed an Increase in Engagement rate by 30% and thereby Progressing further in a journey of creating a Digital solution for their Next Billion Users.
Conclusion 😎
Whether You are going to Create a Product for the Market or you are going to Create a Market for your Existing Product, What’s always important is that you understand your end-users Needs by Listen to them and provide a solution that's Usable, Consistent & Seamless.
When you speak about Focusing on End Users, UX comes in as a Prerequisite & Not as a Pheripheral!
Hence Its always important to adhere to UX Methods & Principles Irrespective of What stage your product is in at your Product Life Cycle.
Thank you for reading! Hopeful you enjoyed my Writeup. If you have any feedback, I’d be happy to hear from you.
You can reply on this blog or reach out to me:
at kats2491@gmail.com or else you can also connect with me on LinkedIn.
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