In part two of A Comprehensive Guide To Product Design, I’ll cover design research (user research and market research), user analysis (modeling of the users), and ideation (how users interact with the product, the product structure, and UI).
Product research
Once the
product vision is defined, product research (which naturally includes user and
market research) provides the other half of the foundation for great design. To
maximize your chances of success, conduct insightful research before making any
product decisions. Remember that the time spent researching is never time
wasted. Good research informs your product design
decisions, and the fact that it comes early in the design process will
save you a lot of resources (time and money) down the road (because fewer
adjustments will need to be made). Plus, with solid design research, selling
your ideas to stakeholders will be a lot easier.
Product research is a broad discipline and covering all aspects of it in this article would be impossible. For more information on the topic, make sure to read A Comprehensive Guide to UX Research Methods.
Conduct User Research
As product
creators, our responsibilities lie first and foremost with the people who will
use the products we design. If we don’t know our users, how can we create great
products for them?
Good user
research is key to designing a great user experience. Conducting user research
enables you to understand what your users actually need. When it comes to
product research, researchers have a few different techniques to choose from.
User interviews
Gathering
information through direct dialog is a well-known user research technique that
can give the researcher rich information about users. This technique can help
the researcher assess user needs and feelings both before a product is designed
and long after it’s released. Interviews are typically conducted by one
interviewer speaking to one user at a time for 30 minutes to an hour. After the
interviews are done, it’s important to synthesize the data to identify insights
in the form of patterns.
Tips
- Try to conduct interviews in person. If you have a choice, in-person interviews are better than remote ones (via phone or web-based video). In-person interviews are preferable because they provide much more behavioral data than remote ones. You’ll gain additional insights by observing body language and listening for verbal cues (tone, inflection, etc.).
- Plan your questions. All questions you ask during the interview should be selected according to the learning goal of your design research. A wrong set of questions cannot only nullify the benefits of the interview session, but also lead product development down the wrong path.
- Find an experienced interviewer. A skilled interviewer makes users feel comfortable by asking questions in a neutral manner and knowing when and how to ask for more details.
Online surveys
Surveys and
questionnaires enable the researcher to get a larger volume of responses, which
can open up the opportunity for more detailed user analysis. While surveys are
commonly used for quantitative research, they also can be used for qualitative
research. It’s possible to gather qualitative data by asking open-ended
questions (i.e., “What motivates you to make a purchase?” or “How do you feel
when you need to return the item you purchased from us?”). The answers will be
individualized and in general cannot be used for quantitative user analysis.
Online
surveys are a relatively inexpensive design research technique. The downside of
this method is that there’s no direct interaction with respondents, and, thus,
it’s impossible to dive more deeply into answers provided by them.
Tips
- Keep it short. Don’t forget that every extra
question reduces your response rate. If the survey is too long, you may find
that you don’t get as many responses as you’d like. Better to send a few short
surveys than to put everything you want to know into one long survey.
- Open-ended versus close-ended
questions. Asking open-ended questions is the best approach, but it’s easy to get stuck in
analysis because every user answer requires researcher time for analysis. Plus,
users quickly tire of answering open-ended questions, which usually require a
lot of reading and typing.
Contextual inquiry
Contextual inquiry is a variety of field study in which the researcher observes people in their natural environment and studies them as they go about their everyday tasks. This method helps researchers obtain information about the context of use. Users are first asked a set of standard questions, such as “What is the most frequent task you typically do?” and then they are observed and questioned while they work in their own environment. The goal of contextual inquiry is to gather enough observations that you can truly begin to empathize with your users and their perspective.
Tips
- Don’t just listen to users —
observe their behavior. What people say can be different from what people do. As
much as possible, observe what users do to accomplish their tasks.
- Minimize interference. When studying the natural use of
a product, the goal is to minimize interference from the study in order to
understand behavior as close to reality as possible.
Conduct market research
You cannot
ignore competitors if you want to build a great product. To be competitive, you
need to know what products are available on the market and how they perform.
That’s why conducting market research is a crucial component of the product
design process. Your ultimate goal should be to design a solution that has a
competitive advantage.
Competitive research
Competitive
research is a comprehensive analysis of competitor products and presentation of
the results of the analysis in a comparable way. Research helps product teams
understand industry standards and identify opportunities for the product in a
given market segment.
A
competitor is a company that shares your goals and that fights for the same
thing that your product team wants. There are two types of competitors:
- Direct competitors. Direct competitors are ones whose
products compete head to head with your value proposition (offering the same,
or very similar, value proposition to your current or future users).
- Indirect competitors. Indirect
competitors are those whose products target your customer base without offering
the exact same value proposition. For instance, an indirect competitor’s
primary product or service might not capture your value proposition, but their
secondary product definitely does.
The most
efficient way to do comprehensive competitive research is to collect all
relevant data about your competitors in a matrix. This will help you keep track
of everything that needs to be compared.
Tips
- Start listing competitors before
doing competitive research. Most likely you will begin to learn about competitors way
before you conduct competitive research. For example, during user interviews,
users might share names of products that they think are similar to the one
you’re proposing. During stakeholder interviews, the product owners will
certainly give you a few names of products they see as competitors. It’s worth
creating a spreadsheet that will be used to collect the names of competitors
right at the beginning of the project and try to fill it as you do product
research. Add new names to the list so that you don’t forget them.
- Use a cloud-based tool for
competitive research. Tools such as Google Spreadsheet make it easier to share
the latest up-to-date research information with a larger group of people (both
teammates and stakeholders) and ensure that everyone is on the same page.
User analysis
After
research, the product team must make sense of the data it’s collected. The aim
of the user analysis phase is to draw insights from the data collected during
the product research phase. Capturing, organizing, and making inferences about
what users want, think, or need can help UX designers begin to understand why
they want, think, or need that.
Modeling the users and their environments
Personas
Based on the product research results, UX designers can identify key user groups and create representative personas. Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might use a product in a similar way. Personas are created during the design research process to represent reliable and realistic representations of the key user segments for reference. Once created, personas help product teams to understand the users’ goals in specific contexts, which is particularly useful during the research ideation stage.
Tips
- Base the persona on real data. It can be tempting to invent some
details about personas to make them attractive. Avoid that temptation. Every
bit of the information in the persona should be based on the user research. If
you don’t have some information, do research to fill in the gap.
- Avoid using real names or details
of research participants or people you know. This can bias the objectivity of
your personas. (You’ll end up focusing on designing for this person, rather
than a group of people with similar characteristics).
For more information on personas, read Putting Personas to Work in UX Design.
Empathy map
An empathy map is a visualization tool used to articulate what a product team knows about the user. This tool helps a product team build a broader understanding of the “why” behind user needs and wants. It forces product teams to shift their focus from the product they want to build, to the people who will use the product. As a team identifies what they know about the user and then places this information on a chart, they gain a more holistic view of the user’s world and the problem or opportunity space.
Tip
- Turn your empathy map into a poster. It’s
possible to create a nice reminder of what is user thinking or feeling by
turning the empathy map into a poster. Create a few copies of the map and hang
them around the office. This helps to ensure the user remains on people’s minds
as they work.
Ideation
The
ideation phase is a time when team members brainstorm on a range of creative
ideas that address the project goals. During this phase, it’s critical not only to generate ideas but also
to confirm that the most important design assumptions are valid.
Product
teams have a lot of techniques for ideation — from sketching, which is very
helpful for visualizing what some aspects of the design will look like, to
storyboarding, which is used to visualize the overall interactions with a
product.
User journey mapping
A user
journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in
order to accomplish a goal. Typically, it’s presented as a series of steps in
which a person interacts with a product.
A user
journey can take a wide variety of forms depending on the context and business
goals. In its most basic form, a user journey is presented as a series of user
steps and actions in a timeline skeleton. Such a layout makes it easier for all
team members to understand and follow the user’s narrative.
A simple
user journey reflects only one possible path during one scenario.
A complex
user journey can encompass experiences occurring at different time sessions and
scenarios.
Tip
- Don’t make user journeys too complex. While designing a user journey,
it is easy to get caught up in the multiple routes a user might take.
Unfortunately, this often leads to busy user journeys. Focus on creating a
simple, linear journey (the ideal way to get users to the given goal).
Scenarios and storyboards
After you’ve
identified personas, you can write scenarios of interactions. A scenario is a
narrative describing a day in the life of a persona, including how a product
fits into their life. A storyboard presents the user’s story in a visual way —
similar to a movie or comic. It can help product designers understand how
people interact with a product in real life, giving designers a clear sense of
what’s really important to users.
Tips
- Build a strong narrative. The narrative in the story should
focus on a goal the character is trying to achieve. All too often, designers
jump right into explaining the details of their design before explaining the
backstory. Avoid this. Your story should be structured and should have an
obvious beginning, middle, and end.
- Design a clear outcome. Make sure your storyboard leaves
the audience with no doubt about the outcome of the story. If you’re describing
an unfavorable situation, end with the full weight of the problem. If you’re
presenting a solution, end with the benefits of that solution for your
character.
For tips on creating storyboards, read The Role of Storyboarding in UX Design.
User stories
A user
story is a simple description of something that the user wants to accomplish by
using a product. Here is a template for user stories:
Tip
- Use user stories to prevent feature creep. Feature creep is
the tendency to add more features than a product requires. When designing a
product, try to refuse adding any feature without a user story that explains
why that particular feature matters.
Job stories
A job story
is a way to describe features. It’s a description of a feature from a
jobs-to-be-done perspective. A job story is an effective technique for defining
a problem without being prescriptive of a solution.
Tip
- Define problems worth solving. At some point, you’ll have several
jobs (problems) that you’ll want to create solutions for. Identify which of those
problems have the most substantial impact on the user experience or your
business goals.
Plan the structure of a product
Information architecture
Information
architecture (IA) is the structure of a website, app, or other product. It enables
users to understand where they are and where the information they want is in
relation to their current position. Information architecture results in the
creation of navigation, hierarchies, and categorizations of content. For
example, when a UX designer sketches a top-level menu to help users understand
where they are on a website, they’re practicing information architecture.
Information architecture would benefit from the involvement of users in the IA development process. Product teams typically use a technique called card sorting for this purpose. Designers ask users to organize items (major features or topics of the product) into groups and assign categories to each group. This method helps you find out how users expect to see information grouped on a website or in an app.
Tip
- It’s possible to conduct a card-sorting session online.
Online card-sorting tools allow for easier scaling to a higher number of study
participants. One of the most popular online tools is OptimalSort (which is
free for card-sorting studies with up to 10 participants).
Generate ideas – what will the user interface look like?
Sketching
Sketching
is the easiest way to visualize ideas. Drawing by hand is a fast way to
visualize a concept — enabling the designer to visualize a broad range of
design solutions before deciding which one to stick with.
Tip
- Use a stencil when sketching user interfaces. When you sketch on paper, it can
sometimes be hard to imagine how certain UI elements will look like at a
realistic size. Using a stencil, it’s possible to draw elements for the actual
size of the device you’re designing for. This is great for understanding
whether a UI element you’ve just drawn is large enough for interaction.
Wireframing
A wireframe
is a visual guide that represents a page’s structure, as well as its hierarchy
and key elements. Wireframes are useful for discussing ideas with team members
and stakeholders, and to assist the work of visual designers and developers.
Wireframing acts as the backbone of the product — designers often use them as
skeletons for mockups.
Wireframes
can be presented in the form of sketches.
Wireframes
can also be presented as digital illustrations.
Tips
- Keep wireframes simple and annotate them. The aim of a wireframe is to show the structure of a page’s design — all other details come later. When presenting a wireframe to teams, try to include annotations. Annotations help to create context and quickly deliver key ideas.
- Don’t use wireframes for product testing. Wireframes are hardly used for product testing. Even though they help designers gather feedback on design during initial research, they don’t replace actual interaction with a product (through an interactive prototype).
Continue reading part three of A Comprehensive Guide to Product Design: Design, Testing, and Post-Launch Activities.