Validating Product Design
You can’t expect to be agile if your customers aren’t up to date
Agility, it is truly the most overpowered attribute in DOTA 2, I mean have you seen what Ursa can- Agility not the skill? As in for class? Oh for our class. Alrighty then.
I would like to take this time to hearken back to a central component of the agile menifesto:
“Responding to Change over following a plan”
Following this tenet of agile, we must make sure that a design that we make has been reviewed by our customer before officiating it in our design (by coding it in). It is our job as a hustler to defend our design and give ground only when necessary.
Lo-fi
So one of our starting points is to decide what the application’s general look will be like. Think of it as a sketch that we are doing before filling it with color. Low fidelity sketching is very quick to do and the feedback can be close to immediate, providing much needed input to the design.
Some questions about this design can be answered immediately:
- Can I sell the design at all?
- If I can sell it, will it be in the right direction?
If I’m going to design a line of kids dolls, the last thing I need is to have adults be more interested in it than my target audience.
sO hOw DId yOU dO yOuR lOfI????
Well we used wireframe.cc to design a lofi prototype, as you can see here: https://wireframe.cc/PPLhf
And we immediately sent this to our product owner who approved it wholeheartedly. I didn’t even have to negotiate the product.
Hi-fi
Right so, we made the sketch right? Now we gotta fill it in with colors and all that. High fidelity models are usually very detailed and look almost like the finished product without the actual functionality, more or less.
This more specific design allows us to confirm if the owner’s vision fits with out own and just synchronizes both our efforts.
sO hOw DId yOU-
Ok this joke has been driven to the ground, but what we did is use figma to make a hifi model.
Validating our product
If that’s all the article has, I’d be a hipster! So, the human interaction is the most important part of selling something. I picked up some tips and tricks from an American car salesman, here they are:
- Act consistently and aim at your product owner
We need to act in a way that is consistent, by building a rapport and ascertaining who you are pitching to, we can optimize our tone, how we use their names, etc. to make sure that they are as comfortable as possible and so are more likely to be interested or focus on your pitch.
2. You are the expert
You’ve done the UT testing, you know how your team feels about your features and you know what your product is best at. Don’t be afraid to act the role of the expert in front of the owners, even if you’re not the most knowledgeable about the product, you sure beat their understanding of it.
And that is about it. I used these principles when presenting the previously mentioned stuff and it worked, no complaints.
Conclusion
Uhhhhhh…. Don’t smoke kids and don’t do drugs.
