How to scale your UX strategy along with your business?
So, your business has been growing. Customers are lining up to try your product. Charts are going up and to the right. You’re bringing more people on board and perhaps you even raised some money to really step on the gas. Good for you! Now, it’s time to grow up. Gone are the days of a scrappy startup with a duct-taped product. And as your business matures, so needs your approach to user experience. Time to develop a UX strategy,
Scaling a business is hard. Doing that and maintaining good UX practices is even harder. But worry not: below we explain the most common growing pains ailing product teams and UX designers. Watch out for them and your customers will thank you.
You build what you measure, but first…
Books, articles, and blogs about entrepreneurship are full of arguments to put the user at the center of your design process. How do you do that, though? In tech, user-centric design is often reduced to a soundbite: you build what you measure. We have abundance of tools that allow us to track and optimize every interaction users have with our products. A/B testing, funnel analytics, UI heatmaps, customer acquisition cost, and so on. They are, indeed, powerful. There’s a catch though.
First, do you have enough data? As a web analytics consultant Ruben Ugarte points out, to be data-driven, you need data. Take note that a lot of case studies about gathering incredible insight from number-crunching come from companies with colossal data pools like Google, Netflix, or Spotify. You don’t need that much data to draw meaningful conclusions but before starting an experiment or spinning up another A/B test always ask yourself if you’ll be able to distill signal from noise.
Another gotcha is that when numbers become available, product managers often follow them blindly. They shouldn’t. Growing means you get more resources to implement quantitative methods but it doesn’t diminish the value of good old user research. Quantitative analysis tells you what people are doing with your product but only qualitative research tells you why. Your company is never too big for you to talk to customers about the why.
No matter the scale, UX is not a numbers game. It’s an empathy game.
Customer service is UX
Good customer service is inherently human. It requires empathy, personality, and patience with foundations in strong product knowledge. This makes support difficult to scale and as a company grows, the customer service department usually gets siloed and turned into a factory of canned responses. But in neglecting customer service, you’re neglecting customers themselves. How can you take care of UX, then?
How customer service fits your scaling strategy depends on your business. If you want insight from pros, take a look at how Buffer, Zappos, or Slack are approaching support — they all serve different types of customers and work on different scale but the common denominator is that they take it seriously. Our advice — you do the same. But make sure to look beyond quick response time and high satisfaction scores. As your company grows, think about how the product and design teams can tap into the knowledge of the customer service department. Make sure that the voice of your support agents is heard when you’re designing, prototyping, testing, and QA-ing.
Because as talented as your designers, developers, and quality engineers might be, they talk to the users of their products rarely or not at all. Support reps do that all day, every day. They know the most common requests and the most infuriating issues with your service better than any dev on your team.
For any product manager worth their salt, knowledge of the support team is a treasure trove. Don’t throw it away.
Featuritis
Featuritis, feature creep, whatever name you fancy, it’s still one of the worst traps for product teams at growing companies. When you started, you had tons of ideas about what your product could be. You dreamed up additional functionalities leading up to new revenue streams. But reality sets in real quick when you’re strapped for cash with only a handful of people working on the project and the deadlines looming. There’s just no way to deliver anything beyond the core service. But after your business takes off, you suddenly have more money, more people, and more time. There’s a strong temptation to dive into the opportunity and start adding one feature after another. Then you can show them off on your website or bring a list to your investors and be like look at how great these 34 things we built are.
Except they’re not. Adding features feels good because it gives you a tangible proof you’re growing. First you had two features, then five, now twelve — progress, right? Wrong. The goal of a UX strategy is putting your product on a trajectory to get better, not bigger. A lot of startups overlook the opportunity in improving their early product and instead go on to create a patchwork of disjointed features, most of which remain unused or — in the worst case — get in the user’s way. It’s like the later stages of a Jenga game — you add one piece on top while everything below is wobbling.
Resist the temptation. Look at your product and listen to what your customers are saying. What problems are they solving with your product and what hinders their progress? Then have your product team focus on these things. How to address them? Sometimes it will indeed be new features. More often than not, however, you will just need to take a step back to make two steps forward. If you notice the users dropping off at a high rate in their first week of usage, a new feature will only make it worse. But maybe you can redesign the onboarding to make them understand the product better? Or if your customers are complaining about outages, don’t respond with a sleek new UI — get to work on the stability of your service. Think in terms of problems, not features, to make your UX strategy stand the test of time.
Dragons be here
Growth is exciting. But in all the excitement it’s also easy to fall into traps. It’s easy to put too much trust into data you don’t have and at the same time set aside the priceless input from customers. It’s also easy to believe that scaling means adding more features. Watch out for these when setting your UX strategy and you will be safer on the uncharted waters of building your own product. But remember that safer doesn’t mean smooth sailing. It’s just avoiding the worst storms. There are tens or hundreds of other things you will inevitably trip over and that’s fine. Learning from your mistakes is as essential part of UX as any.
