Gathering great design inputs from users
At ColoredCow we are partnering with an organisation to digitise their homegrown project management process. It’s not just about automating their processes, it is about increasing their organisation capacity to deliver many more projects, much more efficiently than they do without a software product. It is to increase their scale and resulting impact. The intervention product needs to be designed in a way that enables them to achieve the vision.
To design the product in a way that would achieve the vision or solve the problem effectively, it has to be built around the behaviours of the users. One way is to observe them and another is to have them walk us through how they do the things currently.
In my case the users are the clients. I needed to understand everything from the client about their project management, which would define the product. Learning about their behaviour had to be approached in a way that would open up all kinds of insights to feed into my UX & UI creation processes.
Here are some of the things we can do to understand them better as they walk us through their idea:
1. Not to think of design or solution. Yet.
As designers, we want to jump to design as soon as possible and get our hands dirty. Create the UI and tinker it to perfection; because that’s what we’ve built our credibility for. And while our customers talk about their idea and what to build, we’re thinking away how to design the solution. We may catch ourselves doing that more often than we’d like. And yet, the right thing now is to really listen to them and hear out their challenges and note it to the best of our ability. We need to be able to come back to it without the loss of context and clarity for the solution phase. Right now is the time to ask questions which helps us break down the problem statement further.
2. Read their body language
There’s a lot of communication in the unsaid words. Not all the people are able to dissect their thoughts and articulate it for you in a way that will provide for direct design inputs. It needs to be understood from their body language apart from their words, what they really want. In my conversation, my customer would get excited to hear a probable solution — here I know how I need to design the product. Or they would just pause after hearing me out — here I know I haven’t been clear enough or addressed their right concern so i need to find a clearer way to explain my thoughts and confirm if the direction is right.
3. Bring unknown areas to light
There will be unknown areas that may remain in the dark because it requires effort and motivation to bring it out. This may happen because we prefer the discussion to be light, happy, side stepping from any messy details. Or we may not have enough experience to uncover the details that lay beneath the obvious parts. We need to bring these areas out in full view and assign actions for it. A cue to identify these parts is to ask yourself if X doesn’t happen then how will things move ahead, or you may naturally feel a discomfort thinking about those areas. Instead of leaving it for later or letting it be, bring them to light now.
4. Put them in the designer’s shoe
We may sometimes find the clients describing to us how the interface may look like but they don’t follow through thinking that we’re the experts here. If they stop short, we could nudge them to describe their idea to us. Let’s give them a pen and a paper rather than thinking that we’re the only ones who can contribute to design. Involving them in the process could also build a better connection.
Still not all would voluntarily express their ideas visually. Take a chance to give them the opportunity to design. For an idea that my client got passionate about implementing, I asked them how they see it working. I felt this way I could get into their minds to deliver a product they would love.
5. Pay attention to what works for them
The best design solution may not necessarily be the one that we think is the best or the one that looks smart to us. It may not be the most optimum design as per our reasoning but we’re building the product for someone else and not ourselves. At the same time, this shouldn’t stop us from exploring, experimenting and showing to them if a better solution is possible. We have to aim to be empathetic to their needs and try to fulfil it with our expertise.
6. Show, don’t tell
It works out well to have a resource to visualise the thoughts and leave as little things to imagination as possible. Showing the idea is completely different from explaining the idea with words. This can happen at all stages of client interactions — ex. during the initial meetings for concept demonstration it could be a representation of how different parts of the product will come together showcasing the high level of things. In forthcoming meetings, a working prototype which they can use, will reveal UI/UX thoughts like no other. A working prototype may not be suitable for all projects due to budget constraints or practical feasibility. In such cases, even a paper prototype can work, since the idea is to engage them to have a say in how the product should work.
We as designer, need to find the best ways to align with our clients’ thoughts. It’s is only after understanding them we can form a clarity of where they stand with their challenge and where they want to go from here so that the designs can be the bridge between the two and add value to their work. Building the bridge is our work.
