Exploring UX methods: a case study

Author note: In several articles, I’ll be exploring my UX process and sharing experiences and learnings through a specific case study.

Often times, it can be a challenge for UX designers to bring user experience efforts in to an already existing product. Depending on the maturity and UX awareness of the product team and/or organization, you may find UX can be seen as an afterthought — “hey, we already designed and built this, but can you make it a great experience now?”

TFW someone brings UX in after things are “done”

While sometimes frustrating for any designer, it’s an understandable issue in today’s tech landscape — many of us live in a world where deadlines are quickly set and often looming, markets are fast-paced and ever-changing, and everything feels like it should’ve been done yesterday. However it certainly creates a challenge for any UX specialist, especially when striving for product experiences that are founded on being user-centered and letting customer insights lead to data-driven experiences. How do you find and make the time?

Getting the chance to dive into product work with a team that is open to effectively bring UX in to make the greatest impact is always an exciting opportunity. I’d like to share some of my experiences and learnings getting to tackle product design work with an existing product idea.

Getting started

Creatively problem solving through design is one of the most exciting experiences, but you can’t really solve a problem until you really understand what you’re walking into. A few key things I’ve found helpful when someone approaches you to help solve a problem:

• Ask for their story. This is one of the most fun parts — you get to challenge your listening skills and let someone explain the history and background of what they’ve been trying to understand and solve for. What are they doing and why? How did they discover this opportunity? What excites them about this problem (or problems) and what value and impact potential do they see? This will also help you understand what potential metrics for success are.
• Identify key problems they feel they’re solving. Product ideas exist because it’s a perceived gap nobody’s “gotten right” yet, so find out what stakeholders and teams feel their product is solving and what their differentiator(s) are (if any) in the competitive landscape. This will be helpful later when you dive into user discovery and you can explore this further.
• Identify who the product is helping. The most important: your potential users! Everyone may get excited to talk about what their product does and solves, but always wind it back a step and make sure you know who stakeholders and teams think they’re solving problems for. Ask why they feel this could make a difference for them. Again, this will be helpful as you dig further into user discovery later — you can help build customer understanding and empathy knowing what mental models your team has about their users and see what you find in research.
• Find out where the product is at. Is it just an abstract idea right now? Is there some type of existing experience? Are there any deadlines or goal timelines to be aware of? This will be helpful for any designer to know, as that also informs your strategy for what UX efforts may have been done or are still needed — and what time you may need to negotiate for them.

If you catch a product in the earliest stage when it’s just a floating, abstract idea, you may have the greatest chance to make sure the product experience is founded on those roots of being user-centered and letting data inform and drive product decisions. Take advantage and dive into user research and discovery early to help teams rally around common understanding of users, their pain points and ultimately their needs.

However if you are finding UX focus is requested when a product is in later stage of development or delivery, it may be more challenging since, once a ball is rolling, mental (and literal) momentum takes hold and teams are driven to keep releasing, in love with their solutions and moving towards their perceived destination. UX efforts can be perceived as almost trying to “go backwards” and you’ll get questions and concerns of

• “Wait, you want to take how much time to interview users?”
• “Why would we do this? What’s the ROI?”
• And the ever favorite “Sure, this sounds great, but honestly we’ve got this deadline — can we do it after?” followed by suggestions like “let’s just make it pretty first and then do all this later …”

However you can always find opportunities to bring needed UX efforts into the fold — I’ll share some of my own experiences and how I’ve found successes even when a product is well past the “abstract idea” stage and you’re being asked to take an existing idea to the next stage.

Case study: job management application

Author note: to maintain some product privacy, I will be omitting some names and some client details of the following product. I do have permission to discuss the overall objectives and product work process.

Background: I was asked to help on an existing digital product by a client (the key stakeholder) who was looking to help take their existing platform and find ways to optimize the experience. They had one specific customer already using it, but had gained feedback that the experience wasn’t the most user-friendly. They also felt this platform could have opportunities to scale and benefit other industries and wanted to explore that as well. They had a few goals in mind:

1. Identify strengths and gaps in the current experience
2. Help identify ways to improve the product
3. Explore potential to scale across a larger customer segment and cross-industry

In discussions with the stakeholder, I asked for some background so that I could better understand this product and what their aims were. Here’s what I learned:

Their customer(s): Those working in service-based industries that tend to be high manual labor and provide direct services to clients

Their customer problem(s): The stakeholder had observed their direct customer and others in the industry were very much reliant on manual, often paper-dependent processes. This was costing their customer time, effort and making overall management a cumbersome ordeal with inefficiencies related to physical records and management.

Potential solution: A digital product to that reduces manual, paper-based processes and centralizes business management processes, saving customers time and wasted effort and increases productivity and profit

Product purpose & mission: To allow managers and owners who do B2C work to easily manage their customers and client projects

Evaluating UX design gaps and needs

Armed with this information, I took a step back to see what UX needs I could identify (both through stakeholder feedback and also evaluating the product itself). I found a few areas of opportunity:

• Customer research: the stakeholder had some impressions and assumptions of who our users were and would be (cue happy dance when stakeholders are equally passionate about users!) based on their knowledge of the single existing customer and some general industry research by the stakeholder. However, there wasn’t existing data to bolster those assumptions, so we could do qualitative user research to increase knowledge of and build empathy for our users through personas in addition to helping us avoid self-referential design.
• Competitive analysis: the stakeholder had done some preliminary research on potential competitors, but we could look dig deeper at who key and secondary players were and what the market looked like. I’ll be honest here — I also was brand new to this specific industry with absolutely no prior knowledge, so I felt this would be a great way for me to build my knowledge within this space as well.
• Heuristic evaluation: analyze the current experience and identify general strengths and pain points based on Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics. This would also help me get to know the product more intimately and get a feel for what this product was there to do for the end user.
• Usability testing: while a heuristic evaluation is great for overall understanding of how a product is doing in taking in general UX design best practices, I also felt it would be great paired with an actual usability study with the true end user(s). As I’ll go into in another article, these users definitely had specific mindsets and needs that heuristic principles may not specifically address, so we could optimize the experience further through testing with the actual people who used the product.

Ultimately the stakeholder was looking for help in identifying design opportunities and wanted to enhance their product’s design for a better user experience. Through taking a step back and looking at what currently existed for this product, I proposed the methods above to help us better inform what this next evolution of design should be and made sure to speak to why it was worth doing and what it would do for the product as a whole.

While the stakeholder expressed an ideal delivery timeline, I’ll add here I was very fortunate in that this stakeholder felt they had some freedom and flexibility and were willing to make deadlines flexible if we recognized a need to invest more time to understand our end users (hooray, UX buy-in!), which ultimately they awesomely granted since I explained why and how these steps would help us work towards a truly impactful experience.

Determining next steps

After discussing my ideas for what we could do to create the better user experience the stakeholder was looking for, I felt it could be helpful to document our proposed process. I built a roadmap using Whimsical to visualize what our process and timeline might look like that we could refer to (and adjust as needed, as we’d soon find out).

Visualization of our potential UX process — the what, why and how of our next design steps

Spoiler alert: not all things go as planned

As you can see from my initial aspirational proposal, we (read: definitely me) had grand visions of what all we could do in discovery to aid us through design. However, as the ol’ saying goes “the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry”. Here’s what we ended up running into and how we adjusted the initial roadmap:

Issue #1: While conducting user interviews, we ran into challenges sourcing and running interviews far more than we’d anticipated (I’ll cover this in more detail in a separate article on our interviewing experience).

• Result: we ended up not doing any ethnographic research through proposed field studies.
• Risk: we wouldn’t be able to explore users’ real live environments, leading to us being solely dependent on verbal user recounts of their processes, activities, issues and needs which may or may not be reflective of actual events and experiences or leave some things undiscovered.

Issue #2: Team resources would be limited — the team included the stakeholder/owner, myself (designer), and a few developers

• Result: we wouldn’t have a lot of hands on deck to help support our proposed UX efforts
• Risk: we’d be limiting the diversity of our observations and findings during research as well as potentially risking the ability to fully carry out some efforts.

Issue #3: The team members involved were juggling these efforts in conjunction to other full-time efforts, leading to potential constraints in time.

• Result: we ended up skipping competitive testing of any competing products; I did manage to grab screenshots of other products and compile a basic analysis, but didn’t dig deeper than that.
• Risk: by skipping this, we missed out on getting a deeper understanding of 1) general usability of competitor products and 2) learning how competitor products lined up to their stated value propositions — learnings we could build on for our own product efforts.

Even knowing these issues, limitations and risks in research, we still had some great methods that would help us learn, discover and apply insights into our design process.

Learnings & next steps

Before moving on, I found it was essential I had the following:

• Background and history of the product through stakeholder interviews (understanding the who, what and why of this product)
• Identification of UX gaps that we’d need to address before designing anything (what we were missing to help inform any future design work)
• UX plan to help determine what we’d need to fill our current gaps (plan for how to fill in and solve for what we were missing)
• Stakeholder buy-in on next steps (commitment from the team to ensure collaboration and success)

With that, we headed into our next steps:

• Conducting a heuristic evaluation
• Conducting user interviews
• Creating a customer journey map
• Doing a competitive analysis
• Usability testing & UX benchmarking

Got comments, feedback or questions? Always up to chat UX! You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram.