Designing for measurable impact
A reset helps the team re-focus on the problem we’re solving and the goals we aim to meet
Recently, we started to create a high-fidelity prototype of the toolkit in Sketch. It was looking sleek but it wasn’t feeling right. We realized that we were feeling a disconnect between our research and our design, so we decided to meet to workshop the problem and recalibrate.
To do so, we asked ourselves three questions:
- What problem are we solving?
- What are our user experience goals?
- What are our measurable KPIs?
What problem are we solving?
In our research phase, we spent a lot of time building an understanding of our users and defining the problem the toolkit solves. We took the insights from our discovery phase and created user stories to employ in our sprints to draw a clear line between research and design.
We sat down to remind ourselves what problems we defined in this stage and how the features we’re designing correspond to those problems.
We realized that one feature in particular didn’t line up, and accordingly, we were getting poor response in our feedback from users.
This reset helped us to focus back onto our research and to create a clear strategy for bringing our research into our design and for continuing to test our hypotheses through ongoing research.
What are our goals and KPIs?
We met with our stakeholders and asked them to have a conversation about user experience goals and measurable KPIs. We have discussed these goals previously but we decided to make this a regular discussion item to return to with our stakeholders. This will allow us to iterate on goals and KPIs in response to user research and design concepts and to ensure we are measuring our design against clear goals.
When it comes to KPIs, we are limited as we won’t be able to test the impact of the toolkit because we will be done with the project after the design phase. However, we can bring these KPIs into our design work by strategizing ways to meet them and testing our hypotheses with users.
Reverse-engineering for testing usability, goals & KPIs
As a result of this conversation, we decided to move our medium fidelity prototype from Sketch/InVision to Axure.
I was working on the reading experience of articles in the toolkit in Sketch and getting caught up with how I was going to show interactions in InVision. Aditi was having the same experience working on the search filters.
We realized that we were thinking a lot about our prototype and not enough about our problem, so we decided to switch over to Axure. Axure lets us design detailed interactions based on what we need to test, drawing from our goals and KPIs, rather than having to spend time figuring out Sketch hacks to fake the interactions we need.
TL;DR
Don’t let the research get away from the design; design for measurable goals; and, at this stage, use a tool that lets you test what you need to test, not one that lets you make things look pretty.
