How to revamp a feature/product for a technical user in a B2B company?

“Intelligence is what we learn.
Wisdom is what we unlearn.”― J.R. Rim“

Source:Unsplash

When you work in a B2B medium size old company, it’s hard to get catch hold of users to test every single feature because:

1. Business consultants and the digital leaders (users) have quite tight schedule and responsibilities and they won’t be available every time to give feedback for the small feature to the whole product.
2. You need to be careful about the budget and resources of the company as it’s not a good idea to invest on user testing and pay the user incentive specifically for this purpose.
3. It can be a bit time consuming process which won’t align with the agile process the company follow.
4. So, how to proceed ahead in the process then?

Here are the 2 cents of what I learned:

When I started working in a medium size company, the first thing I wanted to do was to understand all the products step by step, but to a deeper level. Understanding the users, products, requirements and business is really important in creating the user experience.

I started to understand the users with PM, created customer journey for a few features, and did usability evaluation of a few features. I was so excited to see that there is a scope in the improvement of the product from user’s perspective and I was equally excited to see how it would look like once it’s improved.

But there was a twist in the story.

The enterprise products are quite huge, old, complex & complicated. Lot of teams have worked on it, who are not part of the company anymore and some have changed their roles within the company.

Hence the projects have been coated with lot of information over time which led to inconsistency, unnecessary steps involved in accomplishing the goal, sometimes dumping all the information on one page or every page due to lack of information architecture etc. Most importantly, they are used to this flow and hence it’s challenging to push the old flawed concept out of the project.

That also means, only one person cannot have all the knowledge if you want to collect the information from them.

Everyone could be an expert for the set of features they were working on, but not for all the product as a whole.

As it’s a B2B product, it’s also a bit challenging to put yourself completely in the user’s shoes, as the Business consumers are highly professional in the same domain.

Time to reflect back now!

That time, I realized and reflected back to understand what other “mantra” can be used.

Understanding the whole product can be time consuming and hence ineffective in showing the design value you are trying to bring in the company.

Although the first approach could make design noise. But the key points I learned from the first failed approach (in terms of implementing the complete design process) and decided to apply in the new approach were:

1.) First of all, you need to accept that it’s ok to not understand the whole business and product in a go.Sometimes ignorance can be bliss and provide benefits.

2.) The biggest value you can bring in the team as a non-technical person is by acting as a user. You are not influenced by the team, you are not aware of the old notion of the product and as you didn’t create the product from the scratch, you won’t be biased for the same.

You can bring the fresh perspective to it. It allows us (the designers) to free ourselves from the complexity and we can see things differently.

3.) To make the 2nd point successful, you need to break the complex project into the smallest feature and start with it only. Just focus on evaluating whether this feature is allowing the user to accomplish the task efficiently and effectively. Then proceed to next step when it’s done.

4.) To bring design values and to convince the leaders, you also need to educate the team members (you work with) about design in a subtle way during the process.

The process which can be followed to revamp or re-evaluate the feature in such situations are as follows:

Source:Unsplash

Every expert in the team has their specific roles and hence we can make use of everyone’s specific skillset and create the required user experience based on the context.

Step-1) As a designer, you can collect the basic information about the previous user journey from the Project owner(s) associated with the project, because POs/PMs represents the users and their requirements.

During the discussions, you think aloud and throw all the questions which comes into your mind from user’s perspective as they (questions) will leave the POs/PMs curious at the end of the conversation about the parts which hasn’t been addressed in the feature/project.

Now you know the goal. #What

Step-2) Know the user context. As in B2B company, the users can be highly technical so they might understand some jargons and they might have different requirements than a normal user. In B2B case, we are designing products for trained professionals.

Now you know the users and the context. #Whom

Step-3) After collecting enough information about the feature/product to get started with, use “think aloud method” and act like a user and simultaneously evaluate the UX and UI using Interaction principles and UX heuristics.

a) Check whether you understand all the terms.

b) Could you easily follow the steps to accomplish the goal? Is it Effective?

c) How long it takes for you to make the decision to finish the task? Is it efficient? How many times you need to click and scroll to reach the information or Call to action button?

d) Check whether the UX and UI are in synch with the Interaction/UX heuristics.

This will help everyone understand what exactly needs to be built and would give a clear direction.

Now you know the problem. Yayi! #Why?

Step-4) Conceptualize the ideas keeping in mind how efficiently and effectively you can finish that goal. Remember to include the familiarity in your concepts. Don’t go too far away.

Now you have unbiased concepts! #How

Step-5) Share these ideas with the POs/PMs and Tech lead (in some cases) and get their feedback. This process can be iterative to find the exact solution/terminology we all could agree on.

Now you have the solution!

If time permits and if you can get hold of at least 5 internal customers to test the feature, it’s the icing on the cake.

Step-6) Check with the Tech lead along with PMs/POs to see the technical constraints. It also allows teams to develop accurate timelines and cost estimates and then we can go with the development.

Now you can implement it!

By using these 6 steps, you can have your creative freedom as a designer and hence you can create a better experience. Everyone gets chance to play their role and it’s quite clear to all the involved team members that why did we choose to go ahead with the final design. The requirements, goals, clear understanding of the users needs, concepts, the final solution and the technical constraint are all clearly visible to everyone involved in the discussions.

At the end of it, we could find the sweet spot between design, technology and the business, emphasizing equally on each of it and hence we would create a product/feature tailored to the user’s needs.

Let’s design together using the individual’s skills to the best!

PS: Although, these products are quite a good solution when it comes to technology and they are being used widely by the top leaders. Kudos to that achievement!

But here we simply talked about the design challenges and the UX process only. This process can be applicable in specific scenarios. The process may differ for every company and in fact every product depending on the certain other factors.

Thanks for reading so far. Would love to hear the feedback and stories related to the same. :)