Integrating UX Research in the end-to-end design process
If you’re a UX Researcher, most of what you do involves Usability Testing. Usability testing is a methodology you use somewhere in the ‘Execute’ stage of product or feature development or enhancement where you are at a go/no-go decision point.
Integrating UX research in the design practice can be done in two ways: 1. Integrating it in the end-to-end product development process and 2. In the ‘Execute’ stage, integrating it in the feature/issue prioritization phase
End-to-end product/feature development or enhancement
Often, organizations that are not research-mature are designed in such a way that the designers produce designs, and then the product teams decide to test them. Research here is simply a validation of designs before moving on to the next phase — development. But as researchers, we want to do more strategic research that will develop the product roadmap. We want to conduct more discovery research so that we can avoid late-stage decision making at the ‘Execute’ stage. But how can we do that?
- Engage actively with business stakeholders and product designers to understand their goals for the next quarter and the next six months.
- Try to see where strategic research can fit in — whether to understand a certain demographic, or to read the market.
- Take your stakeholders through a research plan which should look something like this:
The other side of this is measuring impact which brings us to the ‘Analyze’ phase. What metrics are we tracking? It could be the net promoter score or digital engagement rate. Based on data from analytics, discuss whether you need to conduct more research at this point or not.
Where ever possible, try to combine data from ‘Analysis’ and data from UX Research. It will help you and the stakeholders make sense of all the information you’re receiving, and also validate qualitative data with quantitative data.
By working closely with business and product stakeholders, and with the insights/analytics team, you’re integrating UX Research in the product development lifecycle.
Feature/issue prioritization phase
This is solely to do with usability testing. Once you have conducted testing, what next? You want to make sure that recommendations from testing are taken into consideration, and that changes are being made to designs before they hit development. If you’re working in an Agile environment, once you have identified all the issues from usability testing, work closely with product and business to help them prioritize what issues to address for day 1 release. But that’s not the end. Work with them to generate and prioritize solutions.
Issue prioritization can be done by measuring the severity of the problem. I use this formula: Severity = Task criticality + Issue frequency + Issue impact. Learn more about this here.
Once you have identified and prioritized all issues, collaborate with multiple designers, product and business to brainstorm on possible solutions. Keep in mind:
- Do we have multiple solutions for each issue?
- Does a solution address multiple issues?
- How specific is my solution?
For solution prioritization, calculate how effective each solution is. Effectiveness = sum of severities. Make sure you’re also addressing the RAIDs when you’re in this phase. In project management, RAIDs = Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies.
By helping business and product teams prioritize issues, you’re ensuring that UX research is integrated in the end-to-end ‘Execute’ phase.
I educated myself on prioritizing issues from usability testing from the links below:
