Designing Powerful User Experiences
Design: it has the power to make or break a product. Just as people don’t readily give out second chances after poor first impressions, people also don’t use a new app or website again if it wasn’t a breeze to use the first time around. So if the end goal is to make a user’s experience pleasant, why is it that so many apps fail?
Every user is unique and will expect different functionality from your product.
Your job isn’t to cater to every user’s need but to tailor your product to your target customers. Let’s take my startup for example. NxtGenDevs (NGD) is a recruitment software that helps startups hire technical talent quickly. We don’t help government organizations or long-standing companies like IBM. We choose this demographic of customers because, through customer validation, we learnt that startups don’t have the resources to hire quickly.
Feature discovery
After you’ve validated your business idea, the next step is to validate your product’s features. The key question here is how can your product bring value to your users. The answer lies with your customer. You will need to ask non-leading, open-ended questions to find out what features are missing/incomplete from existing products in the market.
Typically, you will find that your customer does not have extensive experience or feedback on this subject — after all, if your solution was well known, there wouldn’t a gap for your product to fill. This will mean that you have to start by identifying the full feature set as you see it, along with the assumptions that you make for each feature.
For instance, we originally included a search feature in our initial feature set that we had planned. It made sense from a starter perspective because we wanted our users to be able to locate candidates easily within our software. However, after speaking to customers about the type of experience they would like to have, we quickly realized that we should never display so many candidates that the user needs to conduct a search. The value that we bring is a short-list of qualified candidates, not a long list of prospects.
During this process, it is important to keep your goal in mind. You want to discover a list of features with your lead users that are essential to your MVP. This means that your feature sets need to be both minimal and viable. Both of these can only come from continuously considering justifications for each individual feature decision that you make.
Paper first, then technology
There are a ton of websites that will help you create wireframes. Do not use them… yet. The first step to any successful product creation is to explore your product. You can’t do that if you are stuck figuring out how to place a button correctly on your screen. Focus instead on the feature list you created with your lead user and use it to help drive your creativity in the right direction.
Remember, every decision that you make should be backed by real customer needs that you collected through validation.
Your job is to understand the pain and create a value proposition in response. How you choose to visualize your value proposition will be in the form of your product.
As you wireframe, it’ s easy to get stuck on the sequence of events. If you don’t know how login will work, just skip it. Start with modelling the flows that you are most familiar with. Go to the parts that you can best visualize and start by sketching those out. If you find yourself making assumptions, note them down so you can go back and validate them.
Break down the user experience into distinct flows and wireframe those. Make sure that you follow through each user flow from end to end. For instance, when purchasing an airline ticket, you need to go through about 6 steps. Search for a flight, choose a class option (economy, business), enter passenger details, enter seat details, confirm payment and confirm the purchase. Instead of wireframing parts of flight search and parts of the passenger details, finish one user story (such as flight search) from end to end. This will help you to test each component separately with your user.
With NGD, we quickly learnt that time was the biggest factor for startups. Our value proposition is we make hiring so easy that you don’t have to spend more than 5 mins on our platform in a day. Our users pay us for the time that they don’t spend on the platform, not the time that they do. The feature we choose to help us deliver this value proposition is through a simple one-page design.
Validate your design
Once you have your first drawing of how a feature will work, digitize it. This will help you rethink the layout of your page as you create a virtual model. Think of each button as a stone that your user steps on to cross a lake. If a button leads them away from their next stone, you’ve just guided your user to fall into the lake. Proto.io is a great tool to use because it is faster than building your product with real code and as such, it does not require any programming to use it. More importantly, it helps you iterate quickly without facing a mountain of technical bugs.
A great way to test your user flow is to have someone who knows nothing about your product or industry try to follow your flow. Testing with friends is cheaper than testing with a customer and it also allows for basic logic gaps to be filled. If they rely on your instruction throughout the process, your product isn’t intuitive enough. Try to simplify the path to common actions that a user can go through. If possible, keep their pathway linear in the beginning. Most users do not want to start their use of the product with extensive configuration. Add features one at a time to restrict yourself from making it overly complicated.
Then comes the moment of truth; your lead user’s feedback. Try to get them to use it in front of you and to say what they are thinking out loud while they are navigating through the app. This way, you will learn faster about the buttons that aren’t obvious enough or the flows that send your user on a wild goose chase.
With NGD, we learnt that our user wanted the developer scores to line up on the far right as they scrolled through them (you can see the scores highlighted with a yellow box). This allowed the user to look at one area on the page, whereas our previous design did not. Our original design placed the score beside the candidate’s name, which shifted the location of the candidate’s score with the length of the candidate’s name. This small but powerful design change tremendously improved our user’s experience of our product.
Iterate frequently
Iterating early in the process is not only cost effective but will save you multiple headaches. But in order to iterate early, you can’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re married to your first design. You have to remember that your initial design is not the one the market will see. The first design will be seen your lead user and they will want to iterate upon it. Don’t be afraid to look at other designs as sources of inspiration. Muzli is a great source for designers to learn about modern yet powerful designs.
You are not married to your first design.
As I previously mentioned, you need to create a user flow from end to end. The Mona Lisa painting iteration is a great example of how the artist focused on creating a user flow from end to end. In the first step, the artist created a square area around her head and upper chest and drew enough detailed to recognize that it is her face. Only in the second step did the artist add detail to her facial features. The artist then when on to focus on Mona’s arms/hands and repeat steps one and two. Define the step you want to create end to end and send that feature for the user to test and break. This process will allow you to iron out any misunderstandings you and your user had during customer validation.
As you add features to your product, keep a close touch relationship with your lead user. Embrace failure and see it as a growing process for both you and your product. Good luck with your product creation & remember to have fun with it!
