You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people.
— Dieter Rams
Those little moments, when participants express a sense of relief, joy and even excitement. There is nothing more rewarding in our field than seeing work improve the lives of others.
— Lo Wheelwright, Senior User Experience Designer at Amazon
If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.
Albert Einstein
Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.
Steve Jobs
Process
- Challenge
- Users have problems, pain points, needs, and wants. Businesses have goals. We have an opportunity where the two meet.
- Understand
- Start with the current experience, empathy for users is paramount.
- Define archetypes (psychographics and ethnographics) and personas (demographics). What are their core aspirations, needs, and behaviors?
- Understand the experience flow. Create journey maps, experience maps, and service blueprints.
- Synthesis
- What themes and mental models are at work?
- What insights can we discover? Use the 5 why’s and first-order thinking.
- Problem
- If we do a fantastic job delivering this product (or service or feature), how will we improve someone’s life? Key metrics for UX outcomes are the changes we will observe.
- What are the business outcomes of a great user experience? (increasing revenue, decreasing costs, increasing revenue from existing customers, increasing market share (new customers), increasing shareholder value)
- What problem are we trying to solve? Align business, development, and design on outcomes.
- Ideation
- Formulate assumptions and hypothesis.
- Brainstorm. Open the door to various possibilities, crazy or not. What is the preferred future and vision? How Might We workshops can formulate strategy.
- Picture It! Sketching is one of the quickest ways to capture and articulate ideas.
- Momentum! A lean UX process will help ensure collaborators are productive.
- Test
- Create low-fidelity prototypes and test. Learn fast. Repeat!
- Agile methods encourage working software over documentation.
- Research. Create tests that might include contextual inquiries, usability testing, and A/B testing.
- User outcomes are the North Star. Review user feedback and discover what was validated or invalidated.
- Deliver
- Create high-fidelity assets.
- Partner with development and business to ensure the deliverable and outcomes match.
- Create systems automating consistency and coherence in the final deliverable.
- Consider the final deliverable a ‘hot potato’ that business, development, and design all touch.
- Iterate
- We live. We learn. We change. We grow.
- We learn by doing. Things change (culture, people, technology, expectations). Tomorrow will be different… and better!