Different ways a Matrix Diagram can help you prioritize and make design decisions

This might be the most frequently utilized chart to unblock design workflows. But did you know that it can be used to prioritize more than just ideas?

If I had to pick a favorite tool to help move my projects forward, it would be the matrix diagram. A matrix diagram is a simple plot used to analyze and understand the relationships between a set of items based on two weighted criteria. Matrix diagrams have saved me tremendously in many projects, by helping my clients identify their priorities at that moment. They are flexible charts that can be used in many different situations.

In this article, I’ll share some best practices on how to customize the matrix diagram for different scenarios throughout the product development life cycle.

Here are some use cases where matrix diagrams can be helpful:

• Planning: Stakeholder Prioritization
• Research: Pain Points Prioritization, Data Analysis Prioritization
• Design: Big Ideas Prioritization
• Development: Bug fix/UX debt Prioritization

Planning

In consulting, most client facing projects have stakeholders, who are from both the client side and the consulting company side, to represent different perspectives of the business. Furthermore, within the project team, it’s common to have stakeholders who work closely with the core team (e.g. product owners) and stakeholders who occasionally interact with the core team from an extended team (e.g. subject matter experts).

To help understand how to best communicate with each stakeholder as everyone’s level of influence and interest is different, we can introduce the matrix below to help optimize the effectiveness of communication.

Research

Good design is based on good research. Research helps us identify user pain points and growth opportunities. After hours of interviews and shadowing, researchers will recommend a list of items for us to tackle next. Obviously, we cannot work on all of them, so the question becomes: where do we start?

For prioritizing the Pain Points to be addressed in the upcoming iteration, criteria like Business Impact and User Impact are the way to go.

On the other hand, if we are trying to identify what concepts to explore or which data model to develop next, the Business Impact and Value of Novelty are often used.

I like it because building a data model or vision concept is usually a long-term investment, so measuring whether a proposed concept is innovative enough can lead us to select the one that matches the organization’s unique value proposition the most.

Although you may be tempted to start thinking about feasibility of ideas early on, feasibility is not a recommended criteria at this early stage of product development. Since we’re trying to find the right problem here rather than a good solution. We’ll look at feasibility in the next section.

Design

Once we have identified the right problem, I’d start with ideation. When brainstorming ideas, we should focus on quantity rather than quality because this way is more likely to spark more discussions with the team and then lead to high-quality concepts. So the next thing we must do is prioritize this large pool of ideas. The Big Idea prioritization matrix is probably the most frequently used prioritization chart, plotting User Value against Feasibility. It’s simple and effective.

Since we’ve accounted for business value when picking the problem in the research phase, we can leave the Business criteria aside for now. A good practice after putting the items onto the chart is to discuss the plot with the team, making sure everyone feels comfortable and making any adjustments as needed.

The obvious choices are those in the top right quadrant, but I would also encourage everyone to give the other ideas another chance. Oftentimes, ideas sitting in the top right quadrant are popular ones among your competitors too. Consider the unique business values that your product has when prioritizing the ideas. Depending on how you would like to segment those ideas, I use the four-quadrant chart and the three-quadrant chart below interchangeably.

Sometimes, a project may have competing business priorities. In this case, I like to draw multiple charts and compare them. For example, let’s say we’re designing an e-commerce store and have generated six ideas after a brainstorm session. The challenge here is that business stakeholders have two goals for next quarter: №1 Increase Order Frequency and №2 Improve Customer Confidence. To find the Minimum viable product (MVP) candidate, we can center the plot around different business goals like the charts below.

This time we’ll evaluate the user impact of an idea through the lens of its effectiveness at addressing the business goals. In this case, while the effort to build each solution remains the same, having Smart Notification (Idea D) will be more successful at increasing the order frequency, and sending Product Survey (Idea F) has a higher potential to improve customer confidence.

Therefore, the obvious MVP winner goes to Real-time Chat Support (Idea B) as it can tackle both problems well. Again, don’t forget to reassess the idea of building a Sales Analytics tool (Idea E) since this may become the differentiator among other competitors.

Development

In my experience working with development teams, there have been many arguments around which bugs should get fixed first. For visual bugs or UX debt, measuring User Impact against Ease of Fixing can help identify quick fixes. When it comes to performance issues that may impact the entire platform, I’d switch the axes to Business Value against Level of Urgency. Not all the technical bugs are an easy fix, so ranking them by the level of urgency would make more sense.

Overall, there isn’t necessarily a correct answer when choosing the criteria for both axes. This matrix diagram is very flexible, and you can customize it to suit your needs, whether you are in the research phase, the design phase, or the development phase. The goal here is to facilitate a conversation within the team, and help make design decisions by identifying a tangible and actionable solution.

Xindeling Pan is a Product Designer & Design Thinking Coach at IBM iX based in Cambridge, MA. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.