How To Build A “WOW” User Experience
And It Has Nothing To Do With Software Development
You must have thought that software development is the most complex part in rolling out a successful product. Sure, it’s a nightmare for many, but building a solid user experience is even challenging. And yes, user experience design is NOT software development. There is much more that goes into product thinking far before we even start writing a code. And many founders and product owners miss the beat here.
We typically follow the five step process to create the user experience that our founders wish to offer their customers.
I — Product Aspiration
A typical “user experience design” kickoff is to understand the product aspiration i.e. why the product really matter to a user. This requires understanding the user behavior, user psychology and doing some user research to understand why a user will ever use this product and what value it brings to the user. This is the beginning of a high level concept development.
Outcomes: This phase includes a high level concept development and builds a list of aspirations for the product to exist.
II — User Story Boarding
This steps involves a detailed description of the requirements and functional specs. One needs to get into the minute details about the user flows, user personas, user behavior, user interactions, call to actions and outcomes. This is an important stage so DO NOT MISS OUT THE GRANULAR DETAILS!
With our founders, we use the user story document that narrates the entire product inform of a story. It’ typical format includes a sequence of wording like,
“As a <user>, I want to <click the facebook icon> so that I can <view the latest social updates>”.
These stories are often coupled with defining the acceptance criteria for the development team to know what will be accepted when the story is delivered. Yes, it’s a laborious task but its worth spending time now instead of reiterating the code later in the dev cycle.
Outcomes: This phase is completed once we have detailed user stories developed. This phase also triggers the need for building the necessary content required for some of the user stories. This content includes narrative, headings, text for prompts, pop ups, messages, emails etc.
III — User Interaction Design
This phase includes a sequence of diagrams to help clarify a user interaction visually. We craft the user journey and start building the foundation for the user experience. As Steve Krug explains in his book, “Don’t Make Me Think”, the real user experience one should aim for is “Seamless”.
The user should NOT be thinking, instead they should just be following what you really want them to do.
With our founders, we have a practice of building sequence diagrams or interaction flow diagrams that highlights a users flow of interaction. These interactions are defined through the “call to actions” leading to the desired outcomes. Since this also includes the data being used, passed or processed during the steps, we also create a detailed information architecture to ensure a timely availability of all the information used / required in the product.
Outcomes: Information flow diagrams and Information architecture.
IV — Mockups
Mockups, often terms as wire frames represents how the product content and features look on the web or mobile. It’s the placement of content on the application screens and defining a visual application without too much consideration of look and feel.
Outcomes: LoFi — Low Fidelity Wireframes are produced and can be used to run a demo with early users, partners, investors to get feedback.
V — User Interface Design
This is the final stage of user experience design that fills in the aesthetics to the entire experience. Aesthetics are driven by typography, color schemes, design elements, pictures, videos and placement of content. Once the designs are done, the entire user experience is defined for the app and its ready to go into development.
Outcomes: HiFi — High Fidelity Wireframes are produced as a final version of the app before they are sent to the software development team.
Many founders keep pushing the dev teams, keep iterating through dev sprints and keep incurring costs and burn resources. They often do not realize that it’s the initial thinking and attention to details that actually translates into a killer user experience. Spend more time building up the mockups before you even start your software development.
Remember, more changes you do in the later stages of the development lifecycle, more cost you incur on your application development.
