An iterative approach to UX design

So all great web design projects start out with that spark of genius. You’re so convinced that your latest inspiration will be the answer to all your marketing prayers that you funnel your budget into it with gusto.

You spend weeks with a reassuringly expensive design consultant sculpting the perfect user experience from top to bottom, safe in the knowledge that it’ll work. You’re not sure how, but it will.

You share your vision with stakeholders who make enthusiastic noises, and push the project eagerly into production. After months of development, the finished site is unveiled to your waiting public. Then nothing happens.

Digital tumbleweed.

You scratch your head, wondering why it didn’t work. You hurriedly tack on a feedback form to ask your visitors what they thought. You discover, to your chagrin that half the features you crammed in weren’t actually necessary. If only you’d known that before you spent your entire budget building them! But it’s too late — there’s no money left in the kitty to fix it.

You’re not alone — this is an all too familiar story, and it doesn’t need to be this way. It’s easy to avoid too, as long as we remember a few simple rules:

1. Don’t blow your budget all at once

It’s tempting to dive in and go all-out for the complete user experience right from the start, but the chances of you getting it right first time around are almost nil. The very best user experiences are evolved over time, fine-tuned through iterative design processes in response to genuine user feedback. Nobody — and I mean nobody — gets it right first time.

2. Plan your project in bite-sized chunks

Quickly flesh out your project roadmap so that you know where you want to end up, but don’t waste your time planning every exhaustive detail. It’s important that your overall vision is clear from the very start, but it’s also vital to remain flexible and responsive to your customer’s needs.

3. Do your research up-front

Don’t wait until your website goes live before you speak to your customers — do it before you even start. Give them incentives to fill in a questionnaire, or better still, if you’ve captured their details, email or call them directly. Most people are more than willing to give a critique of a web service that has frustrated them. Find out where you’ve gone wrong in the past, and how you can improve their experience with you in future.

4. Release early and often

Don’t build the entire experience in one go. Plan your project in phases, and release it to your users in bite-sized chunks. Give them a little time to check out each phase and then ask them for their feedback. Not only will this keep you focussed on your visitors and their needs, it’ll also give you an excellent reason to keep in regular contact with them.

5. Improve the user experience

Listen to what your users are saying, and use their advice to inform design decisions. Not only will you improve your overall user experience, but you might even discover a few new ideas along the way. Failing quickly and cheaply is a great way to reduce risk and increase ROI, and nothing shows your customers that you care more than responding positively to their feedback.

6. Don’t move ’til you improve

Don’t be tempted to plough on blindly with your development roadmap until you’ve addressed any outstanding issues. As long as your user experience is improving day by day, there’s really no hurry to reach the end of your development plan, and your visitors will thank you for listening to them.

The aim of an iterative design process is to reduce risk by ensuring that your budget is only ever spent on elements that add genuine value to your user experience, and that any unnecessary features or potentially damaging mistakes are identified before precious cash is wasted on them. It’s better to leave your visitors wanting (and asking for) more, than to confuse and infuriate them with a lot of nonsense they don’t need or want.

Following these few simple rules, we can create cost-effective, engaging user experiences that deliver better ROI by reducing risk and waste. And let’s face it — in this day and age, that’s something we all need to take very seriously.