My PrOCESS
Understanding Users and Solving their Problems
Did you know that design can never be finished because there are always new insights to uncover? It is important, as companies, it is important to understand the value and process methodology is an iterative process of identifying actionable pain-points and how to solve them.
The importance of giving users what they want by building what they need.
User experience is a term or concept that has been used over the years to refer to the feeling users have when interacting or using different products and services. This is an overarching term that can cover many things, from how consumers use a product to how easy to use and accessible a product is, and the relevance of product content displayed.
User experience can also be described as the ease at which users navigate products and services and their experience when doing so. This involves direct interaction with the product or service and how it helps complete tasks or satisfy needs.
How do you do this and why is the user experience process important?
The user experience (UX) process methodology can be divided into four broad stages; user research, design, testing, and launching or implementation. The UX design process methodology follows this order. However, it is important to understand that the UX process methodology is an iterative process, meaning it must be repetitive.
We understand that a design can never be finished because there are always new insights to uncover, strategies to reevaluate, and decisions to be made. We should also expect revisiting and repeating various steps in the UX process methodology to optimize and improve UX designs.
Within every stage of the UX process methodology, there are many steps that a UX designer needs to take to enhance user experience with products, services, apps, or websites. These steps are discussed below in detail.
The global recipe for Design Thinking
Driven Discovery that works every time!
01
User Interviews
Crucial Conversations to Understand the User
User interviews cover almost all user-related topics. They are used to gather information on users’ feelings, motivations, daily routines, or how they use various products. During these, users often are anxious, over-zealous, or reluctant to share information.
As the interviewer, it is up to me to leverage sympathy to make a connection, make them feel comfortable, and extract the information that is relative, uncovering pain points.
02
Personas
Find the users who use the product
What are user personas for and why should we use them? Where do we start when creating one? A persona, a representation of your product’s base/user, a powerful too used to gain critical insights into the target audience journey, habits and preferences. It is a fictitious profile that serves to help teams work to create the optimal experience.
Ideal personas contain drivers, scenarios, and qualifiers that help place a user in a distinct situation, with a unique problem, that we then proceed to solve.
John Doe
Manager
“It’s hard to do each task individually and There isn’t a way to tell who is active or inactive on the app”
Daily Tasks
- Peer reviewing all of the submissions
- Helping the team stay on track
- contributing to some of the major changes
- Creating and managing all the users and new accounts
Goals
- Get all of the submissions done for the day
- Provide every team member support when they need it
- Ensure that submissions are correct
Pain-Points
- A lot of manual work
- Unable to limit access for specific users
03
Journey Maps &
Story Storyboards
Put yourself in the user's shoes
Ok, so we know who our users are. Now what? Well, depending on the particular challenge you will most benefit from creating either/or a journey map or a story board. These are both workflows that outline the users steps in navigating either a challenging event or process. They tell the story of a user experiencing a scenario in which they consume information, process the information and take action based on what is happening or what they are seeing.
Journey mapping and story boarding are a great ways to creatively gather any roadblocks in a journey or experience, and ideate solutions to move users forward in their quest to get a task done. This in turn will result in a list of features or services one may want to focus on and develop further, for the new experience.
Before Login
While User is Logging In
After User Logs In
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Posting a Message
The ability to post, share, and delete messages to the activity feed.
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Commenting
The ability to comment an reply on post and to other users messages as a reply.
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Like and Share
The ability to like a post, and share the post via private message or feed.
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Follow & Subscribe
The ability to follow a user, or subscribe to their content to receive notifications.
04
Feature Prioritization
Prioritize features based on Importance and Impact
Task prioritization is a way to leverage features in order to build effective architecture within a UI and provide users with the capabilities they need in order of importance and frequency of use. Prioritizing features helps guide order of implementation, size, performance, functionality, and placement. Key Factors for prioritizing development and design are…
- Frequency of Use: How often does the User, access this feature/function/tool.
- Importance to the User: How important is this task? Is it a large priority in the users day-to-day?
- Level of effort: What is the level of effort on behalf of the design and development team to develop solution?
- Time to implementation: How long will this take to implement?
05
Card Sorting
Organizing information in a way that makes sense to us
Card sorting is a research methodology that can help you discover how users understand and categorize information. In a card sorting session, participants sort “cards” containing different items into groups. Card sorting has many applications from figuring out how content should be grouped on a page, deciding how to categorize information for a content library or most commonly, layout the ideal navigation for a site.
You can use the results of a card sort to figure out how people group and name content and information. These insights can guide the research when designing or assessing information architecture to ensure it is organized in a way that makes the most sense to the audience.
Method
MY Periodic Table of Practices
On the right, you will see a list of practices, deliverables, and applications. I have over 16 yrs of experience practicing UX research, designing digital products and building design systems.
Do you a skill set you need on your team? Reach out so we can chat and find out how I may be of value to your team!
