UX Design for Startups — Improve your Product’s UX in One Day, Part 2
This is Part 2 of our article on how startups can improve a product’s UX in one day! In Part 1 we presented the first 3 of 7 effective design tools for improving digital products. We will now focus on the remaining 4 along with links to useful resources.
4. Customer journey mapping
Customer journey mapping is a collaborative activity used to uncover product pain points, opportunities, and seeing how they fit in the overall picture. It focusses on user assumptions and their mental model about how a product or service should work from start to finish (and not just within a user interface).
To get started, gather all key advisors and mentors. Be sure to include representatives from customer support, billing, marketing etc. It’s a perfect opportunity to synthesize all internal goals, connect different roles and give everyone a sense of ownership of the product, thus making for a cohesive user experience.
To create the map, all you will need is some sticky notes and markers, and a sheet of paper big enough to accommodate a grid of sticky notes — flip chart paper is good. There are many different ways to map customer journeys, but here’s our favorite. Draw a grid of three columns and six rows. Label the columns “Before”, “During” and “After”. Each column represents time. Next, label the rows “Activities”, “Thoughts”, “Touchpoints”, “Feelings” and “Pain points”. Each row represents a different aspect of the journey. Now start applying the sticky notes using two simple rules:
- Only one idea or comment per sticky note.
- Each sticky note is expendable and affordable, so don’t be precious about them. Use them, a lot! Add anything you can think of, and edit once you’ve mapped all aspects of the journey.
Upon charting the experience, applying a pointing system can help you to evaluate each step of the journey. Generating a graph will also make it easier to visualize any pain points as well as reveal new opportunities. And, if you need to present the map within the company, make a poster of it; tell a story. If you don’t have a project of your own to focus on, map the journey of a competitor’s product. Or better yet focus on what people currently do in a situation that you’re trying to address. For example, if you were to reinvent commuting, you’d map the current ways people commute.
5. Communication
Words still form the backbone of communication, despite the emergence of new technologies such as Voice User Interfaces (VUI). Even so, content outside the marketing experience often lacks consistency and tone. How often have you signed up for a product only to get a dull and unenthusiastic welcome? Communication doesn’t only occur when a user interacts with the core product feature. Think about when a user needs to register, reset a password, ask for help from a helpdesk, interpret error messages etc. All these areas and more touch upon a product’s UX.
So when communication is not considered a part of the design process, you in essence design without a defined voice and tone for large parts of the process. And it shows. Often resulting in microcopy that’s inconsistent, bloated, robotic in tone, uninspiring and devoid of imagination and creativity. After all, effective microcopy increases conversions, delights users and improves task rate completions. It can too can save time and resources, showcase an organization’s culture and help to build trust with users. Therefore, look at all areas where a user communicates with you, making sure communication is consistent at all times.
Look to develop a voice and tone that reflects the personality of the startup. The industry exemplar is MailChimp’s Voice and Tone. Aaron Walter’s brand persona can showcase your strengths and values, that customers can then relate to. The key is to differentiate yourselves from the competition.
When you have decided upon the general concept, anticipate all potential touch points, successes and failures and provide microcopy relevant to each scenario. Consider using a microcopy table. Refer back to your customer journey map if you have one. If it helps, you can use a flowchart to visualize steps between events / tasks. Even, throw in a word bank or brand dictionary of terms to use and/or to avoid. Don’t be too concerned about the form in the beginning, focus on the content.
6. Generating ideas
You want to explore as many ideas as you can from the start, considering at this stage it’s relatively inexpensive to do so. Keep in mind that there are often many different solutions to a problem so investigate and experiment with as many as you can. Avoid focussing on one idea or waiting prior to a launch to see whether an idea is any good. By exploring ideas together as a team you can quickly identify whether concepts are feasible as well as challenge any misconceptions. Even so, you don’t want to be spending weeks or months exploring ideas.
The Design Sprint, popularized and optimized by Google Ventures, is a great tool to use. It’s a time-constrained (generally one week) five-phase process where design thinking is used to generate and test initial ideas. Whether you strictly follow Google’s version or something similar, the notion of generating ideas and lots of them is what makes design sprints so interesting and useful. All ideas are regarded as good ideas, no matter how crazy they may seem! As such, all stakeholders are expected to contribute and participate via hands-on exercises, such as Crazy 8’s, One idea, Storyboards, Show and Tell, and Voting. The process is so effective and fast that by the end there is often a feasible yet concise concept solution that everyone involved can agree upon and own. Thus ending endless debates over months. It can also be utilized in further product iterations should there be a need for further improvements (hint: there always is).
So what’s a good way to generate ideas? To begin with, ensure everyone involved, including key stakeholders, are together in the same room. Start with each person generating eight quick ideas in 8 minutes and then have them pick their best idea. Next, ask them to evolve their chosen idea further by adding more detail (20 minutes) and to then develop a storyboard in relation to the proposed concept (20 minutes). Each idea should then be presented to the entire group, followed by a vote. Each individual is able to cast one vote for a concept they find to be most viable.
7. Validating ideas
There will come a point when you will need to verify whether the concept you’ve developed resonates with users. But, don’t leave it too late. The sooner you’re able to start testing a concept prototype the better, as you’re then more likely to minimise the risk of any unseen surprises arising later on.
To validate a concept you don’t need to have developed a fully featured product or service. The prototype can be paper based or interactive designed using tools such as Apple Keynote or InVision. What matters most, is that you can showcase something to users which reflects your ideas. Furthermore, this doesn’t necessarily have to be a one-time activity. While you don’t want to be iterating forever, going through at least 2 or 3 iterations will only serve to strengthen your concept. Also, having users evaluate your work at each step will ensure that you do not overlook anything either.
By conducting a well planned usability test you can always look to gain invaluable insights. To begin with, make sure you set essential performance indicators, and clarify your goals. For instance, what constitutes success or failure? Is the goal to increase conversions, improve user satisfaction, identify whether a redesigned process results in faster completions? Feel free to also use findings from any earlier user research.
When thinking about tasks for users to complete, be sure to set goal oriented tasks. Otherwise, you will influence what the users say or do, thus taint your data. Therefore, avoid using leading questions or suggestive verbs such as “browse”, “search”, “find”, “record” or “upload”.
If you’re able to arrange one-on-one sessions with users, then sit back, observe what they do and how they react, and listen to what they say. Be sure to record each session, too, as it can be a lot to take in. If at any point in the session a user asks for any confirmation you should answer: “I don’t know. What do you think is the correct thing to do?” If a user has difficulty in completing a task or has stopped ask them “What are you thinking right now?”, “What would you do next?”, “Is that what you expected to happen?”.
There are also many online services available too that can help with testing prototypes. For example, the preview service Peek. The important thing to keep mind with any form of testing is to never freak out if a tester doesn’t get something. It could be a sign that the concept needs revising or revisiting altogether.
Conclusion: embrace design thinking
By following a meaningful design process, evaluating data, facilitating collaboration, and generating lots of ideas — it is possible to dramatically improve a digital product within a very short period of time. However, it is also important to retain design thinking even after the initial concept has been developed. Only then will each further product iteration be a step in the right direction.
Want to learn more about how you can improve your product’s UX? Tin Kadoic and Marko Dugonjic are running a UX for Startups workshop in NYC on November 11, 2016. Ain’t that a cool date?
Resources for designing better digital products:
- The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman
- Just Enough Research, Erika Hall
- Experience Mapping, Adaptive Path
- Designing for Emotion, Aarron Walter
- How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody, Abby Covert
- Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz
- Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Steve Krug
- Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems, Steve Krug
- Undercover User Experience Design, Cennydd Bowles and James Box
- 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People, Susan M. Weinschenk
- Remote Research: Real Users, Real Time, Real Research, Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte
- Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World: Adaptive Path on Design, Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, David Verba, Todd Wilkens
- Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?, Seth Godin
- You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself, David McRaney
- Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine, Jeanne Bliss
- Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, Indi Young
- Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky
