Experience before Products: Our approach to Product Design
Building a new product is always an adventure, learn how to take the most out of that process.
Note: You can also download the complete guide in PDF.
Building a product is an adventure. You never know how much time, money and resources it will take and whether it’s going to be successful or not. We have good news for you. We’ve navigated those waters before. In fact, we love to do it that much, we even created a process to help us along the journey.
We love how many companies have created a trend by being so transparent about themselves, culture, methods, product roadmaps, and, some of them, even their salary. We decided to follow the path of those great companies such as Buffer, by releasing our very own product design process with everyone. This is a method we’ve been using, evolving and polishing over the years and it basically combines decades of experience and best practices.
The bar is higher than ever
In today’s world, competition is harder than before. That’s why we designed a user-centric process to develop digital products that focus entirely on your customer’s needs. That way, we can give you the potential to delight your customers in any project we get to work together.
Not all products are the same, we know that, however we have put together decades of experience and best practices to ensure success.
Exactly what problem will this solve?
“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it” — Simon Sinek
Everything we do has a purpose. Before we even start drawing wireframes, throwing lines of code or even thinking about what kind of technology stack we’ll use, we need to clearly understand one thing: What exactly is the problem we are trying to solve? We believe customers buy solutions, not products.
For whom do we solve this problem?
Everything we do, starts with the user experience in mind. Once we have a clear understanding of what the problem is, we need to understand who, exactly, we are solving this problem for. We identify a market segment or audience group and develop a persona for each of those groups.
Understanding who’s your customer and what is the relative priority to get this problem solved is key if we want to launch a successful product.
Each persona has its needs
What does this user struggle with? What is this person trying to achieve? What are this person’s goals? What’s the relative priority for her goals? What’s the difference, in terms of goals, between both the user and the one who pays? This is where research and empathy play a huge part. At this point, you may have an idea of what you think this person needs, but you want real data to back that up.
Write the Opportunity Statement
Once we have a solid understanding of our user personas, we can create a problem statement. This is where we define our long-term vision for a product solution. Now, we understand that, while we keep developing the product, we need to be able to refer back to the stated user and problem statement to ensure that you, your team, and your client, are always clear on what the objective is.
Looking for the best possible solution
So, with the problem statement in hand, we start working on possible solutions. But wait a second, we’re still not talking about technology. We’re mostly talking about which set of processes and workflows we can do in order to have the best user experience. What job is this product doing? How are we going to measure this product’s success?
The solution
“If you build software on top of a broken process, in the end, you’ll have a broken software.” — Aaron Levie, CEO Box.net
Once we have all the possible solutions, we pick the one that makes most sense. That is, the one we believe is the best suitable solution for this given problem. Needless to say, we should be prepared for it to evolve over the course of the project as we build and test against it. It is important that the solution is backed by research data around a real need of a real user.
Product Roadmap
At this point, we understand our audience and core user. We understand their needs and can identify the opportunity to solve their pain points, and our proposed solution is aligned to our client’s business goals. It’s time to work on a winning strategy; that is, to plan how to move forward.
There are a variety of mapping exercises that are immensely valuable for outlining these strategies.
User Stories
Following our scrum-like process. We plot the path of our user through their experience with our product. For example, while we were building an inventory management software, we story-mapped the entire inventory life-cycle process so we could understand each interaction point that the product might need to serve.
Flow Mapping & Wireframing
Once we established the big picture and have a clear understanding on what the process would be. We start plotting the interactions and flows that make up this experience.
For example, when we worked on a invoice management software, wireframes and flows outlined specifically how we intended to allow the user to create new invoices. Yet another flow focused on sharing those invoices and making sure they got paid.
Software Architecture
Once we have defined the appropriate experience, we need to take it from a technical perspective. This process is very similar to the story map; but this time, a developer will want to outline every technology requirement at each state of the user journey.
Take for example a map we created for a cloud-based app for freight-forwarders that needed to shipment booking, vessel tracking, payment gateways, and document storage. All of these interactions were technically involved and required mapping out in great detail.
MVP
Minimal Viable Products (MVPs) are the best proxy to simulate “real” for a client or user. When you face a MVP to your users, you can learn a lot about your product.
- How are users using the product?
- Can users figure out how to use the product? Where do they stumble?
- Why do users use the product?
- What do users like about the product?
- What do users want added to or changed in the Product?
With the MVP ready, we can move towards building a successful product.
Let’s get ready to rumble!
At this phase, we’ve prototyped the product’s main interactions and flow maps and, most importantly, we have a solid grasp of the user journey and the technical aspects required by the product. It’s time to get ready to rumble.
We work in a scrum-like, two-week sprint format, and put a lot of effort to make sure design and development teams have clear communication strategies to collaborate in an efficient and effective way.
Build. Learn. Repeat.
When you involve your customers and their end-users in the development process, you make sure you are actually building the right product.
Conclusions
It took us some years to grasp these methods, however, every new project brings lots of new lessons. Implement them whenever possible, but keep in mind the transition can be slow. The more you use it, the more you’ll start to see incredible results.
Juvasoft is a digital product consulting team. We love to solve business problems through the application of technology. We focus on building user-centric products to deliver the best user experience on each project we take.
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