Ideation in Product Design (English Ver.)
(Bạn có thể đọc bản tiếng Việt tại đây nha)
Throughout the product development process, have you ever taken on a challenge where you were unsure about how to deliver suitable ideas or solutions? Have you ever been at a loss when defending your ideas in meetings with the product team or stakeholders? Those are the difficulties I’ve personally encountered, and as indicated by the survey below, many others are struggling with similar issues. 🥹👇
So, what is the underlying causes of the issues mentioned above? Let’s delve into the essence of ideas together. Ideas are the outcome of the creative process, which involves connecting relevant information and data in a different way than usual. Therefore, it can be seen that the difficulties we encounter when finding product ideas mainly stem from the lack of information and appropriate methods to connect and weave these data together.
Below is the compilation of my experiences and reflections on the journey of collecting and weaving together relevant information to generate ideas for 1SEAL mobile application. Let’s get started 💪!!
Episode 1. Where the Struggle Begins…
FYI, 1SEAL is a mobile app designed for the VinShop Sales team with the aim of enhancing their productivity through the power of technology. Sales productivity here refers to their ability to complete assigned KPIs in “selling” various products or services to specific target audiences that VinShop is focusing on. As of now, 1SEAL has been in development for over 4 years.
August of 2023 — This is when I joined 1SEAL team, and it’s also the time I took on a massive product challenge — “Optimizing Sales’ KPI tracking and implementation on 1SEAL.” Believe me when I say, that at that time, I truly didn’t know where to start 🥺.
September to October of 2023 — This is the period when I struggled through reading numerous documents about Sales and related feature clusters on 1SEAL. With the goal of evaluating and optimizing the effectiveness of each feature cluster, I conducted surveys to measure their usefulness and ease of use. However, the results were quite strange as the CES scores that I obtained were all within the normal to good range (5.5 to 6.7 on a 7-point scale). Everything seemed to be okay, but why was the Sales productivity still not as good as expected?!
November 2023 — Realizing that my initial direction was not suitable as I only focused on existing features. This is the time when I took several steps back, and revisited the task I got assigned at first in search of new ideas.
Episode 2: The Journey of Seeking Answers
Scene 2.1: Gearing up (aka Requirements Clarification & Research Planning)
In the previous episode, I hit a dead end by not fully understanding the context around the challenge. In this episode, I changed my approach and began again with the first crucial step — Requirement Clarification. It helped guide my entire following research and solution development process. The output answered five questions below:
- Why: Why is this necessary? What is the context (usually business-related) that led to this challenge?
- What: What is the “real” product challenge that we need to focus on solving?
- Who & Where: Which user groups to prioritize? Where are they located geographically? (if any)
- When: When do we need to deliver product solutions to the challenge?
Mapping with my challenge above, when it was refined to “Optimizing Sales activities to increase post-sale profit for the company”, I was able to answer the five questions:
- Why: To increase post-sale profit for the company
- What: Optimize Sales team activities
- Who & Where: Sales team across the entire system
- When: Need to deliver the optimization ideas within 2 months
When the challenge revolves around optimizing a particular process for the target user, I chose to conduct field research to deeply explore their behavior because of these factors:
- Insight Quality: This method provides the most realistic insights because, during field research, I ‘become’ the user, and got the chance to observe and experience what they actually do in their familiar context.
- Product Designer (PD) domain & user knowledge: This approach is ideal for PDs who have limited domain-specific knowledge or understanding of the target user group’s needs. At the time of conducting this case study, I had just joined 1SEAL product team, had limited business knowledge, and few opportunities to interact to get a hold of the Sales team’s goals & needs.
💡 Domain knowledge refers to the understanding one or more related fields that affect the user behavior. It can have a great impact on the features and user flows that implemented on the product.
- Quantity of prior research: You can consider using this method if relevant research is either unavailable or outdated. In my situation, previous research on the Sales team’s behavior was obsolete, as their KPIs frequently change to stay aligned with the company’s business objectives.
- Implementation resources: Specifically, the preparation & execution time of the plan should align with the committed timeline, and the research budget (travel or incentives) should be within the company’s allowable limits.
When planning for field research, two important parts are developing the question set and establishing user selection criteria.
— Regarding the question set or script, one way to fully explore and avoid missing information about the user behavior is to apply the “Before — During — After” mindset.
For Sales activities, I divided the script into three main sections — “Before Sales”, “During Sales”, and “After Sales”. Then, I created the questions to delve deeper into behaviors in each section based on related research documents and my assumptions.
— When selecting users for the field research, two sets of criteria can be considered to ensure a diverse range of perspectives and insights:
- Criteria influencing user behavior: User’s work environment, experience, company policies, etc.
For this case study, factors such as the market size, warehouse facilities, characteristics of goods, user’s work performance in the last 3 months and total sales experience are considered when selecting Sales. - Personality criteria: Tech-savvy, open-minded to try new things, willing to share and provide constructive feedback.
Scene 2.2. Setting Out to Find the “Gap” in User Experience
Giving a big shout-out to the 1SEAL product team for supporting me during this field research ~~
After getting things ready, I set off to Ho Chi Minh City, Binh Duong, and An Giang. Over the next 6 days, I got the chance to work closely with 4 Sales from various backgrounds. It was very enlightening as I was able to gain a good grasp of the different market regions, the challenges, and the intense competition in the sales field and how all of these factors influenced sales behaviors.
To summarize after one month since day 1 of the field research plan,
My team and I had traveled through 11 provinces and cities across Vietnam, collected a plenty of raw behavioral information, along with over 20 issues surrounding the Sales activities, grouped by each stage.
I then compiled this information to build Sales’ persona and visualize their typical day-to-day work journey. Based on this, my team can collectively understand the whole process, how 1SEAL app aided in through its features, the most “painful” points for Sales, and identify any areas for improvement in the whole user experience.
Episode 3. The Light at The End of The Tunnel
Scene 3.1. Tracking Down Root Cause
Before proceeding to the ideation step, it is essential to ensure that we correctly understand the root causes of the issues identified during the research phase. This is crucial for solving them thoroughly rather than applying quick fixes and merely “treating the surface symptoms”. The process of identifying root causes is illustrated in the diagram below👇.
In simple terms, this involves linking the raw data gathered from the field research to break down all aspects of the issue and then continuously asking “why” five times (5 Whys — 5Y) to delve into the root cause of each aspect. Concurrently, we pose “what if” questions (5 Ifs — 5I) at each “why” level to ensure we stay within the context and that the root cause is closely connected to the “surface symptoms”.
Noted that the “rule of thumb” — number 5 here — is relative. In practice, you can stop asking “why” when the issue identified through the answers is beyond your control and hard to change. This often occurs when the issue stems from an obvious truth such as human psychology, inherent nature, or an inefficient work process.
Let’s look at an example of how I identified the root cause for the issue “Sales have difficulty remembering pricing information on 1SEAL” 🤗.
- Issue break-down: Based on observations during the field research, Sales specifically struggled to remember the information at two touch-points, which are the VIP Message and the News Section on 1SEAL app. These will be the two main branches of the 5Y+5I logic tree.
- Root-cause deep dive using the 5Y+5I method — The logic tree for a sub-branch related to VIP Messages is shown below.
For this process to be effective, it’s essential to brainstorm with the team, which includes the PD, product team, and other relevant ones. This collaborative approach ensures diverse perspectives on the issue and helps avoid individual biases.
The outcome of this process will be a comprehensive list of root causes for each issue. It’s important to note that one issue may have multiple root causes and a single root cause can be linked to various issues.
Scene 3.2. The Truth Untold
The ideation process begins by addressing the root cause of each existing issue and refining the solution by linking it to the related “surface symptoms”. Often, identifying the root cause inherently reveals the visible solution to the problem.
For example, one of the root causes identified for the issue “Sales have difficulty remembering pricing information on 1SEAL” is “1SEAL lacks guidelines to optimize the visibility and memorability of information”. From this point:
- The visible solution: Update guidelines and align processes with the team responsible for content input upon feature handover.
- Refining the solution: The root cause regarding guidelines is linked to “surface symptoms” such as blurry images, unoptimized character count in article titles, and excessively close text line heights in article details. From here, I can specifically envision the content areas that need guideline supplementation.
The visible solutions as mentioned above often help address the issue by improving the shortcomings in currently implemented app functions or team processes. To generate novel ideas or solutions, I needed to approach the problem from an alternative angle. Here are the questions to help steer my thoughts beyond the existing features:
- Questions about the use cases of related features
- Questions based on the current behavior of the user when interacting with the feature to explore ways for optimizing both the related user flow and to discover a more suitable method for presenting information on UI.
For example with the issue “Sales have difficulty remembering pricing information on 1SEAL”
- Questions about the use cases of related features
— Why do we need to update good price information on the 2 touch points - VIP Message and News Section, rather than any other point? Could there be a more optimal location to display this information to simplify the Sales search process? - Questions based on current user behavior when interacting with the feature
— Sales typically browse price information on the VIP Message or News Section and then seek out related product details to present to customers. Given this issue, what solution can I offer to streamline this process? Is there a more effective format for displaying pricing information than the current one?
Ultimately, my team and I have come up with 15+ solutions to improve current features and new ideas before moving on to the short-listing & prioritizing phase.
The process of short-listing & prioritizing involves the product team evaluating the feasibility and priority level for each solution based on:
- The issues linked to the solution’s occurrence frequency and their business impact if left unresolved.
- The list of required features needed for implementation and the corresponding development resources
Once the team has compiled the list of ideas for execution along with their respective development timelines, the next step involves finalizing the design and validating these solutions with users during the Testing phase.
The entire process of product ideation can be encapsulated in the diagram shown below. In this process, establishing a clear understanding of the business objectives from the beginning will help guide the team in proposing solutions closely aligned with the business, thereby facilitating stakeholder buy-in. Moreover, keeping the product team involved throughout helps align everyone in one direction and leads to a wider range of solutions derived from different points of view.
⭐ As it can be seen, the product ideation process is a challenging endeavor. Throughout the journey with 1SEAL, I encountered numerous difficulties. However, the lesson learned here is to gather as much relevant information as possible, starting from the issue’s root cause and involving the team as much as you can throughout the process!
Until Next Time!
Thank you for taking the time to read this far 💜. Hopefully, my case study above can be somewhat helpful in your case-solving process. If you have any other methods or questions, feel free to share them in the comments section below or direct me on Linkedin. Peace 🤟
