How to design a wellness-empowered user experience?
A holistic approach to designing digital experiences empowering user wellbeing
Wellness begins at home
To design a successful wellness-empowered user experience, we need to first establish healthy thinking and behavioral patterns within the product development team. In his book, Principles, Ray Dalio explains his approach to ensuring how the best ideas can be brought forward so people can make the best decisions. You can find a summary of the book here. He explains a key difference between goals and principles. While accomplishing goals is vital to any successful organization we should keep in mind that goals are benchmarks or destinations. Principles, on the other hand, guide how you inform the decisions you make. So while goal setting is a no-brainer for organizations to succeed, establishing guiding principles is equally important for achieving organizational wellness. If you haven’t already, defining business beliefs and principles is an important step to running a business. Here is an article to help you in creating your own.
This article aims to provide a template for developing your own principles to help guide a wellness-focused UX process. We will also establish different checkpoints to guide us towards applying these principles.
Principles of wellness empowered UX
We need to understand what are all the links to user wellness at every stage of the UX process. Based on the laws of UX and Maslow's hierarchical needs, here are the six layers to wellness-focused user experience to consider while developing your principles. To learn more about why these principles should help define our UX process check out my previous articles in this series here and here.
In summary:
Physiological needs: Cater to the basic physical needs of user wellness. Design digital experiences that are accessible to users with different levels of diversity.
Safety needs: Prioritize safety needs that include protection from violence and theft, emotional stability and well-being, health security, and financial security. Design digital experiences prioritizing user safety with transparent forms of communication and providing secure experiences when transactions are allowed giving users peace of mind.
Belonging needs: Design digital experiences forming intimate emotional bonds with users. Create community engagement with effective feedback loops so users can feel involved in the process of product development.
Esteem needs: Design digital experiences that protect users' civil liberties, reduces inequality, and benefit democracy and prioritize the mental health of users.
Actualization needs: Create an effective funnel within the digital experience for users to efficiently complete tasks and the business goals. Conduct primary empathy research mapping user behaviors, desires, and contexts.
Transcendence: Empower users with empathetic design to organically transform satisfied users into willing influencers who will market the product for you.
Applying principles of wellness empowered UX
To apply these different principles, we need to establish routine housekeeping so product development checkpoints become second nature within cross-functional teams. Routine checkpoints can be introduced to different phases of the product development lifecycle.
Agile approach
Agile is an iterative approach to project management and product development that enables teams to deliver value to their customers faster and with less hassle. This video explains the key differences between the more linear and rigid waterfall process and the agile approach. Given that most teams focus. Agile development emphasizes incremental delivery, team collaboration, continual planning, and continual learning. Scrum is one of the agile frameworks. Instead of big product launches, working software is delivered at the end of every project sprint. Given the time-boxed nature of design sprints, it is important to run habitual meetings and workshops to align project goals within multi-disciplinary teams.
Meetings and workshops serve different goals and objectives. Check out this great resource put together by the Neilson Norman Group where they explain how the purpose, scope, length, structure, and preparation time for workshops and meetings differ for each. To summarize, meetings are for sharing and exchanging information and workshops are for solving a problem or reaching an actionable goal.
Meetings
Meetings are a way for people to exchange information like status updates or general knowledge sharing. To establish open communication with teams, it is important to routinely meet and share ideas through a democratic process. Meetings do have a more rigid vibe so I love the idea of comparing meetings to ceremonies as this article does. Meetings seem more goal-oriented while ceremonies seem to celebrate a more principle-oriented approach. This article is a great resource explaining the industry-standard terms for design meetings.
Based on my research here are the four main types of meetings to include in your week.
On a topic I will be researching more in the future, this article explains how they end each meeting by measuring the happiness metric of team members.
Weekly goal setting meetings
Goal: The goal for this meeting is to establish short-term (e.g. week) and long-term (e.g. quarterly) individual and group goals.
Who it is for: This meeting is for the entire cross-functional team including developers, content creators, researchers, and designers.
The priority for this meeting is to align goals and get everyone on the same page. Some teams like to kick the week off with Monday morning meets while some teams prefer to end the week with routine Friday meetings. Whatever day works for you, the important thing is to establish a consistent pattern that teams can come to look forward to.
Weekly design critiques
Goal: The goal of the design critique meeting is to share work in progress and receive feedback.
Who it is for: the Design team.
Critique is an important part of any design process. This meeting is intended specifically for the design team. Facebook has an in-depth design critique process explained in detail in this article. It is a good idea to have this type of meeting in the middle of the week. It gives time during the week to implement the feedback. Each designer presents their work in a set time, maybe 10 minutes. Each presentation needs to start with what the designer is working on, why this solves a certain problem, and articulate how they are going about solving this problem.
It is important to understand that critique is not criticism. For the feedback to be constructive it is important to encourage questions and objectivity. It is also a good idea to set the parameters to measure how successful the design is. The critiquing parameters are measured in terms of 1. how the design addresses users wellbeing (e.g. accessibility, the user wants),
2. how consistent the design is with the organizations brand identity and
3. how simple the design solution is.
One-on-one meetings
Goal: The goal of this meeting is to allow members of the product design/development team to be able to meet with each other at their discretion based on needs and when.
Who it is for: Anyone.
Apart from team meetings, it is important to encourage communication within teams with an open door policy.
Standup
Goal: share updates on progress and obstacles across workstreams
Who it is for: Crossfunctional teams.
Whether we are working remotely or locally, this is meant to be a quick (typically 15-minutes), daily meeting at the start of the day to keep the team informed and connected.
UX Workshops
In comparison to meetings where things get discussed, workshops are where things get done and for solving challenges. Workshops are usually at least half a day long with a concentrated time dedicated to idea generation and hands-on activities that allow groups to achieve actionable and predefined goals. This Nielson Group article is a great resource sharing a cheat sheet on the 5 common types of UX workshops and when to use them. Here is a summary:
Discovery workshops
Goal: Create consensus on the current state, project milestones, and action plans.
Who it is for: Core-project team leads and project stakeholders.
This meeting should accommodate a whiteboard or if it is virtual, a mural board. Team leads will discuss the current state and make decisions about plans and processes that will shape the approach to the project. This workshop is a great one to conduct for team leads before the project sprint kick-off meeting with other team members.
Empathy workshops
Goal: Help cross-functional teams and stakeholders understand and prioritize user needs before designing a solution.
Who it is for: Core team members, key stakeholders, and users.
E.g. Researchers meet with other team members after conducting primary research when possible to brainstorm from a user's perspective. Techniques can include; Point of View statements and How might we Questions, creating empathy maps, quick customer-journey maps.
Design workshops
Goal: Brainstorm and discuss a wide set of ideas, product features, and solutions.
Who it is for: It is important to get diverse perspectives so team members; cross-functional teams, project leads, and other stakeholders.
This meeting should accommodate a whiteboard, posits, markers, etc or if it is virtual, a mural board.
NM group has an in-depth article on how to conduct successful design studio workshops.
It is a good idea at this stage, to explore as many ideas as possible with our judgment. These ideas will be further explored by the UX team outside the workshop.
Prioritization workshops
Goal: Build consensus on which features customers and other stakeholders value most and prioritize them.
Who it is for: Core team members and key decision-makers.
Features are usually prioritized based on user need, time, cost for business stakeholders. This workshop informs the features or product prototype that will be developed for usability testing.
Critique workshops
Goal: Ensure that design decisions align with user needs and desires.
Who it is for: Multidisciplinary roles who are critical to the design process.
At this stage, it is important to plan for an informal environment to encourage open communication. The usability test results will be discussed to inform continuous learning and the direction for a new design or next phase of the design.
Six UX checkpoint approach to meetings and workshops
All nodes lead to wellness
I like to think of meetings and workshops as routine interventions to make sure the UX process is not only aligning with the project goals but also staying true to the user wellness-focused principles.
