Product Design is Never an Individual Work
Have you ever felt like being assigned to a project but don’t know where to start? Often, we don’t know how to begin to create things because we can’t get our minds figuring the whole picture just yet.
The good news is, collaboration and teamwork are always encouraged in product design, and that’s where product designers should start. For example, when my team and I developed a new service for Tokopedia Sellers, we utilized several collaborative UX methods. Here are some of them.
1. Card Sorting
Card Sorting is a method to help design the information architecture of a page. It’s helpful to understand how people group and perceive your page’s content. I used this method to help organize which seller features will I include in the new service. It’s beneficial to:
- Categorizing seller features
- Decide what to put on the page
- Build the structure of the page
Preparation
1. To conduct remote card sorting, you can use online tools like Miro or Figjam.
2. Create a list of topics you want to organize. I recommend limiting 30–40 topics by picking the most important or most frequently used.
3. Set up the time and invite your relevant stakeholders.
Conducting the session
1. Show the list of cards to the participants and explain the session’s objective and what they need to do.
2. Then, let participants organize topics into categories and name them. They may add cards to give additional topics or put aside cards that they think are irrelevant.
3. Once done, give time for the participants to discuss with one another. The final clusters are the ones that all participants have agreed.
Result
An information architecture groupings of your page.
2. Co-Design
Co-Design is the act of creating with your stakeholders to align needs and expectations.
Since the objective is to capture different perspectives of stakeholders, the How Might We method is suitable to gather unlimited ideas.
Preparation
1. Provide the context (e.g., project expectations) and divide your working file into:
How Might We (HMW)
To list all the known challenges and questions surrounding your product.Prioritize the How Might We
To cluster and assess which HMWs that need to be addressed.Ideate Solution
To resolve the challenges and questions with ideas gathered.Cluster Solution
To group similar ideas and label them with a representative title.
2. Divide each section into smaller scopes based on the user journey for guidance.
3. Provide blank post-its on the ‘How Might We’ and ‘Ideate Solution’ sections and keep the other sections empty.
Conducting the session
1. Explain briefly about the project and the expectation of the session to the participants. Then, start with the ‘How Might We’ section. Participants will need to rephrase known challenges as a question beginning with “How Might We”. For example:
“How Might We help sellers to decide what feature to use?”
2. Copy all filled post-its to ‘Prioritize How Might We’ and group similar ones. Then, decide together which one to address or not.
3. Move on to the ‘Ideate Solution’ section. Ask participants to propose as many solutions as answering each HMWs questions group. For example:
“Create a personalized recommendation.”
4. Cluster similar ideas and label each group in the ‘Cluster Solution’. Use a ‘Prioritization Matrix’ if the solution cluster is tangible enough to be prioritized.
5. The result of Co-Design is illustrated below. Don’t forget to reinform your action items post-session.
Analyzing the data
Do an Affinity Mapping to work on the many solutions you’ve gathered. It’s similar to Card Sorting, but Affinity maps focus on organizing extensive information into smaller groups of similar items instead of information architecture. Here’s an example:
Result
You’ve developed clear clusters of insights, user needs, or pain points as foundational data for your project. The output will help answer the known challenges surrounding your product. For me, it has helped me to answer these questions:
- How do we introduce the page to sellers?
- What feature information matters the most for sellers?
- How do we let sellers know that what they’ve purchased is worth it?
Don’t Work Alone
Doing all those methods means that I’ve clarified the project scope and where to start, aligned needs and expectations, and grouped ideas for us to begin our work.
Remember, working alone won’t take you anywhere. So don’t wait until you’ve finished your design first before talking to your stakeholders. Collaboration is the ultimate key, and there are many ways for it.
