Stop designing and re-designing your app, show your every version to the users
Good products solve important problems. A good product is key to transforming ideas into successful ventures and creating experiences that delight users. Focusing on the user and understanding their needs is central to the designing and development a product.
Building a product is all about nurturing ideas and connecting them with users.
Let’s say you have an idea in mind, and you think it is going to change the world, or at least someone’s world; how do you convert that idea into an actual product? This path may seem all the more challenging if you haven’t worked with products before. This article paints a process that you can use as a guiding light when building a product.
Building a product does not involve just coding it and marketing it but also testing it with users. Above all, the emphasis should be on how you can stay true to solving the user’s problem. Pretty design, fancy animations, and all the bells and whistles do not solve problems, they are merely the delivery mechanism. The core of a successful product is an understanding of its users and their challenges.
Find a process that works for you
Before diving into the process laid out, it is necessary to understand that building a product is not a math formula. There aren’t a fixed number of steps that lay out the exact route from start to finish. This article can, hopefully, give you some guidance and a rough idea to get your closer to finding a path that works for you. Once you reach a process that seems to work for you, dig in deeper, and try to improve that process.
Bear in mind that the complexity of your product influences the intensity and depth of your development process. Think of the pointers given below as a framework that binds together design, users, research, and analytics into the development process.
1. Define the problem
Every product’s end goal is to solve a problem. Whether that is a note taking app, or a marketing website for a company, both are products providing a key solution to a specific problem. A note taking app mimics or fills in the need for a journal by providing a readily available solution for storing and organizing thoughts or ideas. The marketing website solves the issue of spreading awareness about the company. It provides key information to users and makes the brand more accessible to them.
It is important to define your problem well and the full scope of it. Are you providing a platform that allows people to find the latest and coolest products? Are you making it simpler for designers and developers to share mocks? If you already have an idea for a product, isolate the problem behind that idea. It is immensely helpful to identify and articulate the problem, as clearly as possible.
At this stage, you are simply interested in writing down and understanding the clear need for the product and who it is for. Have a collaborative session with all the stakeholders. Understand their perspectives. This will give you a better idea of the workflow and environment for your product.
Issues are not one-dimensional. Each stakeholder illuminates a different dimension of the issue. There may be multiple personas that your product can work for. For example, Amazon’s online store is as much a solution for online shoppers as it is for vendors wanting to sell their goods.
Similarly, a problem statement that I discovered for zipBoard was:
A tool to find an easier solution for different stakeholders — internal as well as external — to share feedback and collaborate better.
2. Identify your users
If you do not understand your users, it is hard to find an ideal solution for them. Identify and build personas of your prospective users. At this stage look at it from the angle that your initial users are going to be the early adopters. So what is the instant value that your product will be providing for them?
Since there can be multiple user personas for each product, it is a good idea to map out each of those personas and draw out the details that define them. A persona contains the needs, goals and observed behavior patterns of your target audience. It creates a narrative about the user and enlightens what pain points they have relevant to the problem you are trying to solve. Talking to actual users is the best way to create and validate personas.
At the end of this stage, you will know your problem and the user personas that you are targeting to solve the problem for.
3. Draw out your solution
Once you have identified the problem and the users, you can start to brainstorm about possible solutions in the form of a rough sketch or workflow. From all the data you have collected regarding your problem and user persona, sit with the developers and designers to map out ways in which you can tackle the issues.
For us at zipBoard, it was looking at ways to provide easier collaboration for web developers and designers to collaborate. That could be a tool for for them to ideate on, or a platform to upload and review designs.
Discuss the feasibility of solutions. But, it is important to remember that nothing is set in stone at this stage. You could have a dream solution that is just not feasible with the resources and technology at your disposal. Or it’s possible that what your internal stakeholders suggest is not the most intuitive solution for your end user.
At this stage, it is necessary to not lose sight of the problem statement. Too often there is a tendency to fall in love with the solution and deviate from the problem. Don’t let that happen. Love the problem above everything else.
With this background work ready, you can move on to ways to refine and improve your product.
4. See what’s out there: Market + User Research
Now that you have a solid base you’re working with, it’s time to delve into the market and look at similar or competing products. This tells you what the users are currently addressing their problem.
Conducting one on one user interviews with prospective users and the audience of similar products will help you understand the problem and its current solutions better. You can collect key demographic information for defining your market, the kind of motivations that drive their purchase decisions, what marketing messages appeal to them etc.
With all this research and data, you can refine your solution and validate your ideas. If you need to go back to the drawing board with internal stakeholders, do so now. It’s easier to make adjustments early when you’re nimble and agile, rather than late on when you’re starting to worry about RoI.
5. Wireframing
Now that you’re ready to begin designing a solution that seems feasible, refine the sketch/workflow you had initially started out with. You can move onto more refined mocks and create a wireframe for your design. A wireframe lays out the interface, the basic functionalities, and how users can interact with the product. No colors, graphics, or bells and whistles at this point.
This provides a way for visualizing your solution in the way users will perceive it. Get feedback at this stage again. Work with your team of developers and designers to simplify interactions, make things accessible, ensure that the workflow in the wireframe is true to the solution you designed for. Once you have inculcated all the feedback to improve your wireframe and your internal stakeholders are on board with the solution, you will have a pretty good model of what your product and its flow would be like.
You can now move onto building a prototype.
6. Build a Prototype
At this stage, you have enough to create a quick prototype. Depending on resources, you can build a lo-fi prototype or create a hi-fi one that comes close to how you envision the final product. If possible, you can directly start coding your rough prototype in HTML/CSS. There are also many prototyping toolsthat can aid in this.
When building our prototype for zipBoard, we set out with a focus on features rather than invest heavily in extensive design efforts. Our priority was ensuring that the core features were represented clearly and worked well for the user. From a design perspective, we kept things simple. We decided the basic fonts, primary color, secondary and accent colors, line thickness etc. Beyond that we did not invest heavily in extensive design efforts so that we could focus first on the features.
7. Validate with your prospective or existing users
Validating with users is the most important phase. This is needed not just when starting out but after each and every design iteration.
Validation means ensuring that the premise on which you are building the solution is correct and it is actually solving the problem at hand.
Validation can be done in several ways:
- Internal stakeholder validation: Test out the product and get reviews from internal team members. Testing your product internally, also called dogfooding, is one of the best ways to validate. You can get feedback from different kind of stakeholders — designers, developers etc. This gives you feedback from different perspectives. But it is important to not go overboard with this feedback and start over-refining. Feedback from internal stakeholders is good, but end user feedback takes priority.
- Testing with end users: Take the final product back to the initial users that you had interviewed for personas. Let them use the product and get their feedback. If your final design isn’t delivering what’s needed for the end user then you need to go back to the drawing board. Make sure users can test out the product and provide an unbiased opinion. Be sure not to influence their environment or workflow while they try it out.
- Run enough experiments — Running experiments to optimize the product experience helps zero in on one that users are most receptive towards. It is good to start with multiple product experiences and run those as experiments with internal as well as external stakeholders. You can use an A/B testing tool for running experiments or you can even do it manually, but make sure that you test multiple product experiments so that your workflow is such that users can see the value provided to them as effectively as possible.
- Prioritize feedback — Once you start collecting feedback, there will be tonnes of it. Not everything will be relevant right away. Keep track of it but also prioritize it. It is important to not cater to every feedback but be able to identify the critical pieces.
Final Thoughts: Iterate, Improve, Grow
Iterate, improve, improvise. Those are the bedrock of creating a product that serves users effectively. Once you have a product that delivers value and solves the problem for your users, look for ways you can continue improving it. This cycle is not the end of your product journey, rather the start of a continuous iterative process for solving the problem further.
Work on ways to reach out to a larger chunk of audience. Observe how your existing audience is using the product, what are the features they are using religiously and what features seem to be not-so-well adopted. Always collect feedback from them. It is no use growing your audience if the existing users do not stick. Retaining a user is always more cost efficient that acquiring a new one.
As your product starts reaching a larger audience, track key metrics and implement analytics to measure growth. Analytics shed light on existing as well as new user behavior. For example, Google Analytics gives an overview of audience demographics, behavior, bounce rate, acquisition channels etc. Tools like Heap and Amplitude provide insights based on events in your product like sign up, create account, upgrade, new project and so on.
Develop your own process, but stay focused on the problem and the users for whom you are providing the solution.
Do share your tips on what worked as a design process for you and your team specially at an early stage.
