Adapting the design process

Research | Problem | Proposal

Analyze 

• • Affinity mapping: helps make sense & prioritize user needs.

  • Capturing workflows: helps visualize and analyze user flows. You can overlay them with customer pains, and look for opportunities to improve (eliminate steps).

Additional research: Rounding out the problem statement

• • Internal bug tracking and support databases provide insights into existing challenges.

  • Benchmarking: competitive and generic benchmarking helps understand the user's mental model and can provide inspiration.

  • Internal stakeholder interviews: provide business perspective.

Vision Statement and Wireframes. 

• • Vision statement: Crafting with cross-functional partners helps build consensus, understand the problem, define requirements (or job to be done),  and establish principles for future work. 

  • Wireframes: rapidly iterating over designs, using them to conduct generative research, and presenting them to stakeholders for transparency and early buy-in.

Brainstorm | Kickstart | Alignment

Facilitating Design Workshops: Generating Ideas judgment-free

• 1. • Design Sprints: can help teams get unstuck, or test if a new idea is worth pursuing. I've used 3 - 5 day Design Sprints for both.

     • Design Workshops: to generate ideas collaboratively. Some useful brainstorming methods include Crazy 8, Solution Sketching, and Whiteboarding 

     • Thought experiments: imposing constraints can help teams generate innovative or out-of-the-box ideas. 

Facilitating Design Review: Assessing ideas & making the best choice. 

• 1. • Quick-fire elimination: The use of heuristics (ex. target user, technical constraint) can narrow design ideas to the most promising ones. 

     • 2x2 matrix:  helps evaluate the level of effort over the impact of design ideas

     • Pros and Cons: The framework allows teams to evaluate and compare solutions. It also helps keep team members from focussing on edge cases. 

Lo-Fi/Hi-Fi | Interactive

Low Fidelity

• • • Wireframes and sketches: low-cost ways to communicate & iterate quickly

    • Getting feedback with wireframes can uncover issues early on, saving time on both design and development

High Fidelity

• • • Figma designs:  help communicate UI, visual, and interaction design to developers and stakeholders collaboratively and iteratively;  

    • Stakeholders & users can envision the end product and give more direct feedback.

Interactive

• • • Interaction design specifications using Figma (or a tool like Powerpoint) can help convey, transitions, screen flow, and behaviors of new controls. 

    • Other tools, like javascript, or Axure can provide a deeper level of interaction but are expensive to build and sometimes necessary for usability testing before building.

Feedback | Rinse and Repeat

Usability Test: because we never get it perfect the first time. 

• • Quantitative moderated and unmoderated testing with just a few target users can catch many major usability flaws before the product ships. 

  • Qualitative A/B testing can help you choose between one solution or another. 

Measure: because we never get it perfect the first time

• • Instrument the software to collect quantitative metrics on usage patterns using a tool like Rudderstack or Full Story. 

  • Solicit Feedback from users through in-product surveys and forums. Use data to inform the future roadmap