Continuous discovery and design craft: how Botify’s design team builds products (1/2)
At Botify, the Design, Product, and Engineering teams work in synergy to create desirable experiences and make the interfaces in our product suite as easy to learn as possible.
Designing complex interfaces for a specialized field like SEO has unique challenges, so the team doesn’t apply a recipe but deploys a contextual and iterative approach. It requires extensive and exciting fieldwork with experts, and our users, which takes the form of an investigation.
In Botify’s design team, we distinguish four activities that can “overlap and intertwine” in close cooperation with product managers, developers, and our Search Data Strategists (SDS):
- Continuous discovery
- Defining an opportunity space
- Ideation and prototype building
- Interface design and evaluation
These activities are not a predefined scenario of “sequences of ideation, proposals, prototypes, tests and successive iterations”; it is a creative process, a “puzzle to be solved” in which we can use predetermined bricks but whose combinations are infinite.
Conducting Continuous Discovery Activities
Teresa Torres developed the Continuous Discovery Habit approach in her book (2021). It no longer considers user knowledge the first step of a process but a regular activity that infuses throughout the product development cycle. She describes it as
At a minimum, weekly touchpoints with customers
By the team building the product
Where they conduct small research activities
In pursuit of a desired outcome
Continuous discovery proposes to mobilize the toolbox provided by product discovery and user research along the lines of a survey process:
- interviews
- quantitative surveys
- analytics review
- benchmarks
- workshops (to share knowledge, understand business objectives and align teams).
We gather their needs, pain points, and desires by interacting with our users. Each gap between their expectations and what is available on the market represents an opportunity to provide them with a service and create value for both usage and business. As technical SEO is a field of innovation that requires input from both experts and end-users, product discovery and user research provide a vast and complex space of opportunity.
Defining an “opportunity space”
Our users’ expressed (or unexpressed) needs, pain points, and expectations are considered opportunities rather than “problems to solve.” Design is a force of proposals rather than a problem-solving activity. Teresa Torres also reminds us that many services do not solve problems but respond to users’ aspirations, imagining ways to meet their expectations. This is what we mean by creating a desirable product.
We start by visualizing what we know by modeling :
- assumptions,
- user knowledge (personas),
- an experience map.
Rather than a user-centered design that reduces them to archetypes, we prefer to recognize their singularity and complexity to set ourselves the ambition of giving them “power of action” over the data they manipulate. The opportunities created with the product manager are a potential that should not be closed too quickly, but on the contrary, should be explored iteratively and tested.
Within the created — and constantly expanding — opportunity space, you must determine the most important ones. That is to say, those that are likely to create the most value. Our designers and product managers create a structured inventory in the form of an opportunity map from the user’s perspective. Instead of a list, they formalize and populate an opportunity tree that describes relationships to highlight similarities, overlaps, and dependencies.
Before adding each opportunity, they ask themselves the following questions:
- Is this opportunity a need, a pain point, or an expectation, not a solution?
- Is this opportunity isolated or recurring in the user interviews?
- If we address this opportunity, does it achieve the desired outcome?
By prioritizing the opportunities, they identify a target opportunity to work on. To evaluate them, they consider the following criteria:
- How many users and how often are they affected (opportunity sizing)
- Does responding to the opportunity change our market position and differentiation from our competitors (market factors)
- What is the impact of this opportunity on the business? Does it meet the company’s vision and mission (company factors)
- How important is it to users? Does it concern an issue where the current level of satisfaction is low? (customer factors)
From the created opportunity space, a strong product vision, and the testing of hypotheses, the product designer deploys know-how that leads to convincing and elegant proposals for interactions and forms.
The second part of the article will discuss our commitment to prototyping and testing working hypotheses and solutions. One of our convictions is that the design execution is one with the thought and expression of ideas. UI design should be valued more, as it is an integral part of thinking about the user experience.
