Forward thinking UX that your users will love

There’s something quite exciting about turning an idea into a real thing. That’s a role many UX designers fill working in early-stage startups. To accomplish this, one of the first things we as designers do is to conduct early user interviews and look at what other products in the market are already doing. This process helps identify required use cases that we need to design for.

This user study process was very helpful when our team designed the first iteration of Markboard, a web application that helps teachers capture and assess their students’ learning. In the spirit of lean UX, we launched a MVP (minimum viable product) that would be validated and adopted by our users at a basic level. The app was not fundamentally ground-breaking from what the rest of the market was already doing. It simply helped our users get their job done.

Following the launch of Markboard, I was approached by one of our ed-tech specialists to envision the next iteration of the app. He had been in talks with various Canadian and American school districts and was excited about the discussions he’d been having. He had identified some of the latest teaching best-practices that Markboard needed to adopt in order for it to become a leader in the market.

The only problem? We were uncertain how that would look in conjunction with our pre-existing app. How do you integrate best-practice use cases without creating an idealistic or unrealistic user experience? Just because you think the user should adopt a best practice, doesn’t mean that they will. It was vital that these best-practices were implemented in a way that would become a natural extension of the user’s current workflow.

In order to do this, I needed to better understand how a teacher actually works. Fortunately for me, our ed-tech specialist happens to be a former high-school teacher. I asked him questions and clarification on terminology and concepts that gave me insight into a teacher’s world. Through this, I was able to gain valuable insight into our users. I came to understand their workflow and the pain-points that they face.

With this insight, I established a framework of constraints and guidelines that reflected a realistic user experience. Instead of going in the deep end of designing complex and idealistic solutions, I set myself a boundary to work with. This became a great way to validate whether or not these best-practice solutions were intuitive and relevant to our users.

With this said, there will always be a learning curve that comes with new product features. A practical strategy to address this is to provide users with accessible avenues (help page, info tooltips, walkthroughs, etc..) to learn how to use new features and understand why they would use them. Enticing your users by providing actionable benefits is also a great strategy. For instance, if the user is required to input data that will be used later, let them know about its benefit and purpose early on.

Introducing new innovative ideas and best practice can be a challenge. The last thing you want to do is create naïve design solutions that users don’t buy into. Get into your user’s head- understand how they perceive and work through the problems that they face. Your users will thank you for it.

Originally published on July 27, 2015.