there can only be the user
User centric design and development
Simplified account of user centric design and development
I am not a UX specialist and wouldn’t want to claim as one so. But over my career, through practical experience I have learnt that the best way to build great products is by being led by the user and co-create products along with them.
This is my attempt to visualise and present an overly simplified journey of how we can we bridge the gap between the user and the experience we want to build using ‘User Centric Design‘ or ‘Design Thinking‘. The steps below heavily follow the design thinking paradigm and I am not trying to invent anything new. I would imagine, that this discipline of Design Thinking or User Centric Design is probably quite natural with the UX researches and they are experts in this area. I am writing this article for the rest of the agile team members, so we appreciate this process and believe that this is not very difficult. Only skill we need is : to be curious.
If we think logically, the way we flow from identifying a problem that we want to solve is quite fluid. But as much as this might seem logical and fluid, we probably don’t do this well enough.
So, below I have documented a suggested flow of steps that I have followed as we have built products through my career and at various organisations I have worked. I would imagine that some of the details about how these goals are achieved might be different in various organisations, given their practices, understanding of their users and ways of working. But I am quite confident that the basic flow would remain quite aligned.
As I start teaching the PG Industrial Experience Semester students at Monash University, I would be happy for my students to use this as a guidance.
For other readers, this is the reason why you might find the narration a bit oriented towards my students.
01
project plan
When we start an endeavour it is important to develop a holistic end to end view of the undertaking. I would imagine we just want to visualise all the tasks we need to do, when we need to do and if there are any hard deadlines that we must be conscious of.
the idea
One of my product managers used to quote very often:
customers don’t go to sleep just to wake up to use your product. Unless that solves a real problem for them.
The first step would be to start with a WHY and some aspects around the business/customer value.
As a simple example, if we want to write a blog, before we start we need to think through:
Why blog? coz blog is a medium of expression, it is a solution. As a starting point it is important is to think – WHY do I want to write, what do I want to convey, why people would be ever interested to read my blog, who else is writing about the same topics, what other mediums are available to express myself.
02
03
know your users
OK, now we have some idea about the WHY, the business case around it and we may want to explore the idea further. The first step in that process would be to start understanding the world of our users. One of the tools we use at this stage is User Journey Map.
Remind ourselves not to assume ‘We understand our users and their problems’.
problem definition
When we study the existing behaviour of users, we want to have clear view of the goals they want to achieve and distil the problems they face while doing so. The problems are going to lead us to develop a hypothesis. Hence it is crucial that we are able to articulate and define the problems, so we are focussed, gather more information and are able to prioritise and action them.
04
05
goals and metrics
Once we know the prioritised goals, we need to think how we can measure them and what metrics we want to collect
ideation
This is where, as a team, we collaborate to come up with ideas how our new solution will look like and how that would achieve the goals we have prioritised
06
07
prototyping and validation
We are at the early stages of conceptualising and ideation. To reduce wastage of effort and validate our assumptions, it is important to build prototypes and test them with the real users
software development
Usually we try to jump to this step skipping most of the steps before this. Now, that we have a fair understanding of the problem, our hypothesis and it is time for us to create a plan to build