Delivering value beyond screens: How a good handoff impacts your digital product
In digital product design, going beyond the obvious to create a real business impact requires a solid handoff process. This approach extends beyond visual delivery and involves research, validation, and measurement, ensuring that the final product meets user needs and generates value for the company.
But how do you execute a good handoff?
- Research and Benchmarking: The journey begins with a deep dive into the problem to be solved. Through research and benchmarking, the designer understands the needs of users, the market, and existing solutions.
- Certainties, Assumptions, and Questions (CAQ) Matrix: To ensure a transparent process, the designer creates a matrix that maps out what is known, what is assumed, and what needs validation. This matrix serves as a decision-making foundation and guides the next steps of research.
- Usability testing: Time to get hands-on! By conducting usability tests, the designer observes how users interact with the prototype, identifying friction points and opportunities for improvement.
- Conversations with the affected team: Dialogue is essential! The designer meets with the product team to discuss research and test results, discoveries, and proposed solutions. This exchange of ideas ensures alignment and the creation of a cohesive product.
- Hotjar analysis: Data doesn’t lie! Hotjar provides valuable insights into user behavior on the prototype, such as click areas, dwell time, and even conversion rates. This analysis refines the design, ensuring the interface is intuitive and efficient.
- Validation with the technical team: Before final delivery, the designer meets with the technical team to discuss the feasibility of implementing the proposed solutions. This step ensures the design is viable within the project’s technical constraints. If not, project phases called releases or the creation of MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) emerge for the designer to make the initial delivery.
Handoff Completed! What Now?
- Collecting Feedback: Feedback is essential for your product’s growth. After delivery, the designer collects feedback from stakeholders, developers, and end users to identify improvement points and enhance the handoff process in future deliveries. Developers might have questions about some business rules, and it’s up to the product designer and product team to be aligned and try to anticipate (as much as possible, haha) scenarios that could cause developer doubts, making development faster and testing even quicker.
- Measuring Impact: To close the loop successfully, the designer measures the product’s impact on the business through experience metrics like CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), CES (Customer Effort Score), and satisfaction metrics like NPS (Net Promoter Score). This stage demonstrates the value of design and reinforces the importance of a good handoff.
Conclusion:
A well-executed handoff prevents rework and ensures that the final product meets the expectations of everyone involved (from developers to the end user).
In my point of view, it also strengthens the client relationship by centering the user in a product that delivers value, creating satisfied and loyal customers. Users will feel more open to bringing you more issues they’ve faced with your product at other times and suggesting improvements for that part of the journey because they know that improvement will be delivered at some point.
Want to know more about the subject?
Here it is some references:
- https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/how-to-make-programmers-happy-and-design-to-developer-handoff-less-painful-e0a0a299614f
- https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/the-best-way-to-start-a-new-project-caq-matrix-a0344c0293fb
- https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/design-handoffs#:~:text=It%20involves%20transferring%20a%20designer's,breakpoints%2C%20accessibility%20and%20data%20validations.
Hope you had enjoyed the reading!
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