Explaining UX strategy to client. Excerpt from real email communication.
Dear Davis,
I am very interested to design and build something really great, i.e the product your target users will be interested in. The whole project is not for one person, so I will be cooperating with my UX colleagues and Programming partners. Everyone agrees that the best option is to start with some strategy and blueprint following with creation of minimal viable product. There can be 2 approaches: methodically arranged and a chaotic one. Please see the below list of activities we envision to build a methodically arranged product:
1. Lean Canvas — https://app.xtensio.com/folio/3slrrit0
Lean Canvas promises an actionable and entrepreneur-focused business plan. It focuses on problems, solutions, key metrics and competitive advantages. Understanding this model will help us to focus on the features your users really need, opposite to building features nobody needs. You can check more info about Lean Canvas here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o8uYdUaFR4
2. Competitive Audit. A comprehensive analysis of competitor products that maps out their existing features in a comparable way. Helps you understand industry standards and identify opportunities to innovate in a given area.
3. Planning MVP. A strategy for avoiding the development of products that customers do not want. The idea is to rapidly build a minimum set of features that is enough to deploy the product and test key assumptions about customers’ interactions with the product.
4. Information Architecture. Understanding users, data structure and channels. Organizing and planning navigation and content in a clear and consistent way. Understanding each user task that can be accomplished within the MVP product experience. Representing user’s flow to complete these tasks. Resulting in sketches, wireframes, prototypes, usability testings.
5. Visual graphic UI design.
6. Implementation and early testings of MVP product.
7. Evaluation, iterations and continuous improvement of User Experience. It includes usability testings, metric analysis and continuous improvements based on the data. Interaction design, consumer journey mapping, micro interactions, mental triggers, gamification, accessibility analysis.
8. Continuos add-ons of functionality and features based on user research, testings and feedback.
A chaotic approach may or may not include the above activities. Basically, it can turn the project into designing and building features by guess, in a chaotic way, without any plan or strategy. It can be useful for a quicker turnaround with the results based on user testings after deployment. This approach might be cheaper, but hardly predictable (and may become more expensive in the result). So, with the info you already provided, we are aiming to chaotic approach. But it’s up to you to decide.
Please let us know which approach we would take. In any case, we suggest starting with Lean Canvas in both approaches.
Looking forward to your reply.
Best,
Art
