Designing a user friendly solution can be difficult as you navigate your way through remote workshops, ux research and testing. So how do you go from UX research, either as an individual or as a team – to designing a product that is user friendly? How do you convert all that data so it makes sense and you know that you’re building something that meets those needs?
Now you could probably get together a spreadsheet and do this all manually, however if you’re working in a team, or value your time like I do, I turn to a tool such as Product Board. This tool essentially allows you to gather all the information you’ve collated to support your product features decisions.
This can become particularly handy when working remotely, where multiple members of a team can contribute and process research notes. What does this tool look like?
To ensure that we’re getting unbiased information; it’s important that a mix of qualitative and quantitive data is used to support key decisions. So ensure you label where you’ve sourced the data from, and use tags to filter and highlight later.
With each note you add, you can assign it to a Company as well as a user if you’re working on public facing products. This will help later when you’re looking to take a holistic view of your research and ensured you’ve spoken to a wide variety of users.
Once your team have gathered enough data from a wide range of your user base or cohort, you can begin grouping these in similar features. In the image above we have notes against a ‘dashboard design’ and a ‘scheduler’ concept. There are also parent and child themes that allow you to split these concepts into smaller feature ideas. So under scheduler you may have a 3 day calendar feature if your research supports managing time in 3 day slots, for example.
From here you can either take this research and:
- Form a research report
- Create a pitch that supports a chosen feature (pitch is based off of Basecamps’ Shape up process)
- Head into ideation to flesh out this concept and gather further feedback from users.
Which one you choose depends on the insights you’ve found, how your team works and how they prioritise the backlog. Research reports are great if you need to get the business on board with an investment.
Once you have an idea of the feature the business should focus on, it’s time to start problem solving. Concepting is the generation of new ideas, and when problem solving, often it’s quantity over quality to start. Using common patterns can be a great start to solving a solution with a holistic view of design and the experience that users take. Using common patterns also reducing the learning curve for users. If a user deletes a certain way, ensure it remains the same way (or close to) they delete throughout the product.
Once you have a chosen idea, it’s time to create either wireframes or a high fidelity prototype to start testing the concept with users.
Let me know how you go about turning your UX research into product design below.
Stay informed,
Tania.