Research
Most projects kick off with customer and competitor research. Even if the team I’m working with has already been getting to know a problem space for some time there is usually still more that can be learnt from speaking with users, and ideally watching them use the product (or similar products if you are pre market).
Early stage research is often at least partly interview based to dig into the problem space in detail and understand customer motivations, painpoints and opportunities. It can also include user testing and other research methods such as diary studies, card sorting and surveys.
Team involvement: at this early stage the work tends to be focused with researchers (or PMs or designers/others taking on this role). When time allows it’s great to also get more team members involved in research to see the user problems firsthand.
Define
in the define stage I typically take the learnings from the research and:
Create or refine personas to help us keep our users front of mind (especially useful for ideation sessions);
Create or refine key customer jobs;
Map out key customer journeys with quotes and painpoints/points where drop off is likely;
Broadly prioritise based on key problems or jobs (and how they overlap with current business goals e.g. OKRs);
Figure out what we still don’t know and see how we could learn more (especially any quick wins).
Team involvement: I tend to report back on findings, then we prioritise problems as a team. I create personas, jobs and map out customer journeys with some feedback from the PM. If it’s a new feature/business area I love to run team sessions to map out the customer journey so that we all represent different mental models/ways of navigating.
Design
The design phase typically covers an ideation stage, prioritisation (typically via RICE scoring) and a more in depth design phase in a design tool (Sketch or these days Figma).
I usually run ideation sessions with a broad team from across the business (not just the product/dev team). We prioritise 2-3 problems based around key customer jobs, applied to a persona, and use a crazy 8s style session to come up with ideas. We tend to run a dot voting session to refine and group the ideas;
After ideation sessions we RICE score (reach, impact, confidence, effort) with a developer, a designer and a PM (and other members of the business if relevant) and then choose a smaller number of ideas that score highly to further iterate and develop;
I then jump into Figma to refine the ideas and plot out the customer journey so we have a better idea of the experience to discuss as a team.
Team involvement: this stage is where a broader team is much closer to the problem and potential solutions. I may work on a small number of designs for a while to see how we can implement them in a user friendly way and plot out the customer journey, before we discuss them again to ensure the solution is feasible. There might be also some ideas that we know aren’t as practical or straightforward to build but we include purely for customer feedback/gaining confidence around an opportunity.
Prototype and test
Once we feel enough confidence in our proposed solution to put it infront of users I build a click through prototype in Figma (in the past Sketch/Invision). The design, prototype and test phases are relatively fluid, with quite early stage testing happening as soon as we have a flow that is usable. At times I’ve also done very early stage guerrilla testing (more often pre covid!) or tested with some colleagues around the office for reactions while still working on designs. The latter is just for initial feedback as colleagues don’t tend to be representative of users and are usually too close to the designs/business.
Team involvement: I tend to run our prototyping and user testing although I have worked with in house researchers at the BBC and at Monzo. At times developers have been involved in building coded prototypes when the design or testing need is more complex (e.g. our video player designs at the BBC once we were testing accessibility and subtitles). When possible I like to get the broader team involved with user testing but I always try to stay involved so there’s consistency across the results.
Iteration, refinement, build
In the flow chart above the design, prototype, test phase are a circle because there’s usually feedback from the research that needs to be incorporated (or even back to the drawing board completely). Areas that do test well are further refined as a team and turned into tickets for the developers to pick up. We then typically A/B test on our website/App environment to see how the design/ feature performs and how it impacts our core metrics.
Team involvement: work with the team to refine design work, write up tickets, discuss build, UAT and assess the results of the A/B test and whether we should push the change to 100% or we need to remove or iterate again.