Systematic Product design for startups
According to Forbes, 90% of digital product startups fail. But this is the truth, startups don’t fail because the founders have a terrible idea. Most startups fail because they rush to developed the product and put it on the market without proper research, strategy, and testing. They invest months in production without thinking of customer satisfaction.
How to make products that are valuable to users and in line with the business?
The key is establishing a design process that will structure the work and don`t let something important to be missed. How do we create something like that? We are starting by removing the steps that are not making a significant impact and focus on actions that are valuable. Also, we need to think that this process needs to be applied to various projects and give predictable results.
It is essential for the process to be able to rapid build of high fidelity prototypes, and test them with real users. We need to separate the process in three phases that product needs to go through:
Phase 1: Research and strategy
Phase 2: User Experience design
Phase 3: User Interface design
It is not enough to have a”goodquality product,” you need to have the right product. To achieve this, we need to understand the company, customers, competition and the market.
We can create a detailed user profile that will include personality type, emotional states, etc. However here we are focusing only on things that are the most necessary. I don’t say that having a broader user persona is a waste of time, but at this point, we need to focus on segments that provide the most value, we can always add things later.
Knowing our competition will help us to better position the product on the market, create a unique selling point, identify their strengths and take advantage of their weaknesses.
Doing the research for at least three direct competitor companies will give a clear understanding of the market that will help us in future decision making.
The goal here is to extract as much as possible knowledge of the people that are strictly related to the business and the product. They will help us to define a lot of stuff. But how to do this without endless discussions and struggles?
We make decisions based on prioritization. Prioritization is made by giving arguments, structural discussions, and voting, however, this can last forever, so we limit the time for each part.
At this point, we need to speak with the founder, CEO, marketing, sales, development or another team that can give us specific information for the featured product.
First: Strategy
At this point, we are focusing on the big picture, and make decisions. We are defining the big picture, like the company, product goals and challenges.
Second: Journey map
After understanding where we are going, it is an excellent time to think about the product. We need to focus on the big picture and make assumptions for the best case scenarios. We make this for each user persona.
Third: Feature and functionality
Let’s make an overview of what informations we agree on.
This phase is all about translating ideas to something that already start to look like a product. This phase will help us to focus on functionalities and connect everything together.
We need to define what we want to test and create. This can be as simple as adding new element, but also complex as creating the multiscreen flow for a new feature.
First, we create the tasks for each user persona; each task is written in a way to give us information where we are starting and when the task is completed. The first tasks can be created from the journey map that we built before.
Based on tasks we create simple action steps, that can be different screens or different buttons that need to be pressed and will lead us to complete the work. For each task we need to have a maximum of 6 action steps, the point here is to simplify, not to overcomplicate things. The last thing we need to do is to connect all stages in one flow.
After creating multiple tasks, we can merge them and see if any connections adjustments are needed. After combining all the tasks, we will have a clear picture of how users will move through the product.
This step is where we are starting to create the product. We have enough knowledge about what needs to be implemented on each screen and how everything needs to be connected.
The easiest way to start creating the wireframes is based on user flow action steps that we created before.
We know what screens need to be created and we have prioritized features and functionalities. The only thing that we didn’t define is the hierarchy of the sections, groups, and buttons; this is an excellent place to make that. The result will be putting everything together.
We create the entire product wireframes; we solve the functionalities problems; we have an idea of how everything is going to function. This is when for first time we present the product to someone.The best way of showing is by showing the clickable prototype.
At this point we are making a presentation for in-house purposes; this is a great way to test the product for the first time with people that have a broad picture of functionalities of the product. The typical scenario is that developers, product manager or developers will find some flaws. We don’t need to worry about this; it is a good thing.
Testing the prototype need to be based on the user flow tasks and focused on functionalities.
Don’t forget testers are not testing the designer; they check the functionalities of the product; it is a good thing to have negative comments; In the end, they are more valuable than positive ones.
Improving and testing at this point solve the functionalities issues without investing a lot of time.
In the end, the result is a fully functional product prototype without significant usability issues.
We create the entire product wireframes; We solve the functionalities problems; We have an idea of how everything is going to function. This is when we first time presents the product to someone, the best way of showing is by showing the clickable prototype.
The common mistake that the client makes is choosing a website or app that is currently “live” and asks the designer to do design for the new site to be the same as that. There is a strange logic here if the website is ”live” means that it’s”old”so why someone wants to have a new site that looks old. The answer is because the client is scared that the designer will not design well.
Companies try to build their brand; They invest a lot of money to create it and make it as consistent as possible. Companies thought the brand represents the company vision and its values. However, in brand-books, you will not find guidelines for the website. This is one part of the problem, the other thing is that clients have an idea of how their product needs to look. Our task is to translate that idea to actual design.
When you trying to convey a design, idea, moods, feelings, and visions it can be difficult to communicate verbally.
The easiest way to do that is by using mood boards; Mood boards are collections of textures, images, and text styles related to the design style as a reference point.
The easiest way of doing this is to create the mood board. It will give us, and to client enough visual clues, so we will know where we are going with the design and this will help us to align the new design with the brand. The focus needs to be on fonts, colors, buttons, elements, effects, etc.
We show three options and choose one of them, the other way is to make a new unique option with a combination of all of them.
We can use tools, like, Invision, Pinterest even Dropbox Paper. That is how we define the product style without even designing a single page, or touching single design software at all, simple right?
At this point we already defined the style we need to design the interface, and since we have the wireframes, we can finally start designing impressive interfaces.
To create a whole design system is essential to keep consistency. However, it is not an option for some projects. At least you can do is to create a style guide. Based on what is the product we can follow the web best practices, Google material design or Apples human interface guidelines.
No matter if we follow the guidelines or best practices it is crucial to not forget about implementing the design principles, because they are the core of all designs after all.
We create the interface of the product, connect everything in functional prototype; finally, the product looks excellent.
At this point, product will be tested by real users, for the first time. We need to plan the testing, find the users based on user personas, find the proper location, think about crucial questions.
Trial with five users will solve 85% of the usability issues, so we are doing that.
What questions we need to ask, We need to focus on several things:
The most important, we don’t test the designer, but the design, this is why we need to hear negative things(they are most valuable for us).
We covered a lot of stuff, we understood the product on multiple levels, created a strong foundation for the future designs, we have a prototype that is tested with real users, and we get a real user insight.
At this point we are making the decision to move with the concept further and develop the idea or to abandon the idea. After all, we have enough information to do that.
Systematic Product design for startups
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