My company’s products support a range of different customers – from sales people wanting insights to existing or potential customers to recruiters who want to find the right candidates. Our focus is helping companies hit their numbers and succeed, powered by rich data platforms.
The product and UX design team apply a rigorous process in making our products a reality. We don’t just leverage data to help our customers, we use data to inform our product designs and decisions. Some on the design team call it “evidence-based design”, comparing it to what a detective needs to solve a crime.
Here’s a look “behind the curtain” at some of the team’s design process and methodology.
Task analysis and competitive research
In order to build out the most appropriate solution, we have to understand how people work and what they do. Thus we perform a task analysis, which is the definition of the core tasks the users need to accomplish in the system as well as any information that is required by users to “operate” the system. This allows us to identify the “big rocks” that needs to be solved for first, and thus prioritized.
We also do competitive analysis on similar products in the space, and even look at products outside the domain that is being worked in. We know that users have high expectations in the 21st Century of their technology, and that our products are compared, consciously or not, to the last best experience that users have had. This is why we look at modern web and mobile applications, to understand user’s baseline expectations.
Persona definition and validation
Understanding what our customers do is one thing – But user experience design is not just about the “what”, but about the “who.” Understanding what people think about their work, what their pain points and frustrations are, allows us to solve for those things as well.
By developing representative personas, based on user research and interviews, we define an “empathy point” for our designers to user to help prioritize features and design “for” someone. These personas are shared with the product and development team as well, allowing for the extending team to also work towards understanding the “mental model” of our customers. We also validate these personas with customers, to ensure they are accurate and “hit the mark.”
Brainstorming and Ideation
We don’t just work in a single-threaded, single-team manner. We bring in the extended team to ideate and brainstorm, identifying different ways of solving hard design problems. Leveraging the “wisdom of the crowd” we are able to quickly produce innovative designs and visualizations.
A recent example: Members of the US UX were working on a particular challenging design problem for a new product we were developing. We brought in members of the extended design team to provide their thoughts and ideas. The result of the two hour working session was a net-new design direction and a short list of a half-a dozen potential features that could add value to the product.
Concept design creation and testing
Once we have a good sense of the people who would use the functionality being designed as well as the users’ perceptions and current pain points, the team starts creating early concept designs. These concept designs details out the initial interaction model and screen flow of the system being designed. Usually these concepts are “wired up” into a clickable prototype for review with internal stakeholders.
Once the design concepts are approved, we test the concepts with users through various means (due to the recent global pandemic, remote testing is the primary method used). Armed with user feedback, the team tweaks the concepts and starts final production and detailed design.
Closing
There you have it: A quick summary on our design process. We do a lot more than we laid out here, but let’s leave some of those activities for another blog post, and another day.