3 Design Resolutions for 2017
The arrival of a new year is a time for optimism and excitement about what the future holds. But also a time for reflection, and an opportunity to look to the past to find ways to improve. That’s what resolutions are all about.
Being a Design Studio that works with early startup entrepreneurs as well as corporate executives, we encounter a wide swath of design and business challenges. These problems often require a customized solution, tailored to the customer or end user.
Despite this, there are simple measures you can take to implement design thinking. Use these 3 Design Resolutions in 2017 to save time, reduce risk, and most importantly; increase the value you bring to your customers.
1) I will observe customers using my app/website
If you read one tip in this entire article, this is what needs to catch your eye (that’s why I put it at the top). The amount of value to be gained from doing a single usability testing session is immense and impossible to fully explain in a brief blogging blurb (alliteration is fun). So let’s take a broad look at why you should observe your users…
Questions you can answer with user testing:
- What do my users care about?
- Where are they having usability issues?
- How will my users react to a new product/feature?
This is not an exhaustive list, but these three insights are imperative in guiding decisions about where to invest time and money. User tests have massive ROI implications if done at the forefront of diving into a long term project. Want to know whether your customers care about having a newsfeed in their home page before you invest months building and optimizing it? Show a semi-functional prototype to a member of your target audience to see if it adds value.
In an ideal world, the base number of users you should test your features on is five in order to gain an understanding of basic user patterns. However, as you’ll see in the graph from Nielsen Group’s study on usability testing effectiveness, you can still learn a ton from watching just one, far more that watching zero…
25% of problems is a lot, and finding them early with the low investment of a single user test will pay major dividends in creating products/features that are aligned with your what customers actually need.
2) I will do at least 1 design exercise every week
On a related note, a great book to read in 2017 is Sprint. It was written by key members of Google’s investment arm, Google Ventures, that funds some of the most innovative startups in the world like Uber, Stripe and Medium!
In order for the Google Ventures team to help one of their investments solve a major problem in a short amount of time they employ a Sprint. A Sprint, which is explained in detail in the book, is a process of building and testing a prototype with real customers in 35 hours across five days. At Helm we use a variation of the Sprint methodology to organize the work we do for our clients.
While full on Sprints require some serious time investment, there are many components of this problem solving process that are valuable on their own. I’ve picked out two simple Sprint design exercises that will make you more productive and creative in less than than 30 minutes. Try one out next week in lieu of your normal group brainstorming.
Crazy 8s
Sentence Synopsis: You will come up with 8 different ideas and/or solutions to a problem quickly and visually express them with a basic sketch
How long does it take? 5 minutes
What you need? Printer paper, Dark Marker, Timer
What is it good for? Early ideation that requires team members to consider a variety of alternatives. The nature of creating eight sketches will force you and your team members to look past your preconceived ideas to expand or alter them. And the speed of the exercise will allow this process to occur without any belaboring or inefficiency.
Example problems that Crazy 8s would be good for inspiring creative solutions include: designing a home page, creating a marketing campaign for a new product, or even deciding on your office layout.
How do I do it? This activity can be done alone or in a group, if you are doing it as a team be sure to distribute these materials to the crazies (pun); a blank piece of printer paper and markers to each of the participants.
Step 1: Have everyone fold a sheet of paper in half 3 times so they all have 8 panels on the sheet when unfolded.
Step 2: Allow a total of 5 minutes to draw eight sketches of potential solutions. Remind everyone that they are not sketching the Mona Lisa, this is the lowest of low fidelity.
Step 3: Throughout the exercise use the timer to keep your participants moving, and make sure it is clear that this exercise is simply to get ideas out of your head and on to paper.
Step 4: Repeat on the back side of your folded sheet with another 5 minutes of sketching, or move onto the next phase of your ideation session.
Mind Mapping
Sentence Synopsis: You will explore a topic, build connections, and create new ideas through this is a visual form of note taking.
How long does it take? 10 minutes
What you need? Printer paper, Writing Utensil, Timer
What it’s good for? The flexibility of mind mapping may be it’s biggest strength, you can use this technique to delve into pretty much anything. Creating connections will allow you to understand the full scope of a problem, and is a great exercise for honing in on customer pain points and deciding which mapped connections may be worth exploring further.
Example problems that a mind map would be good for exploring include: finding out why customer retention rate is declining or how to improve personal productivity.
How to do it? Mind mapping can take a variety of forms, from the colorful representation seen in the image above, to simply a couple of bubbles and lines on a sheet of computer paper. You can also use mind mapping software like Coggle (free) and Xmind (premium). But the most important aspect of this exercise is you and your ability to sit down for 10 minutes and build the critical connections that bring you closer to true understanding of your problem and possible solutions.
3) I will measure my design decisions
Throughout this post we have touched on the ROI of investing time and money in design thinking, this resolution is about how you validate our assertion.
Measurement is critical to design in general. Valuable data and context provide a feedback loop that drives the optimization of digital design. If you are not currently testing and gaining insights from your design changes you are missing out on highly consequential behavioral feedback. Here are three steps to quantifying the impact design is having on your business.
Get a baseline
The definition of change is to make or become different, in order to do that a norm has to be established. This norm is especially critical when evaluating design decisions because these links to user behavior are not obvious to spot. Before looking into the impact design is having on your business you need understand your historic traffic and conversion metrics. Source this data using Google Analytics or your event tracking software and establish a clear baseline of where you stand before you alter a design variable, which brings us to our next step…
Only change one variable
Just like a scientist you need to control your environment to ensure the results you are measuring stem from your experiment. When you are changing the button size do not add a new product or headline to the view. Remember you are measuring solely the impact of a single design decision. Do not try to change multiple interface elements at once. If you change your shopping cart size, color and location how will you know what actually caused the increase (or decrease) in your conversions? These restrictions are key to gathering valid data and discerning actionable results.
Hypothesize
Just like in freshman biology we’re gonna ask you to form a hypothesis, but this time it’ll be less about frog dissection and about more about performance metrics. Specifically at the beginning of any design initiative you need to identify what you are looking to achieve.
Design is not a frivolous exercise, and every component of your website or app should be geared to an objective.
So how should you form a hypothesis? It comes down to breaking it into a simple two-pronged statement, “We believe (this change)….will result in (this outcome)….” An example of this hypothesis statement is “We believe that moving the placement of the Add-to-Cart button to the right, will result in a 20% increase in customer clicks.”
After a week or two of collecting data you will want to refer back to your original hypothesis and find out whether you were correct, incorrect or need to do more testing. Software should always be evolving. By scientifically making design decisions you will be well on your way to maximizing results and getting the most out of your web or mobile applications.
Helm Experience & Design is a digital product and UX focused studio proudly located in Buffalo, NY.
You can check out our work here and if you’d like to talk more about design, technology, or business just send us an email at team@helmux.com.
