Image of a laptop and phone showing product

UX & Product Design

Notes on tools and process.

A Philosophy?

UX & Product Design is simply about best serving the needs of current users, building the needs of future users, predicting trends and avoiding churn. There are a lot of ways to set up design teams to achieve this.

Product design is a discipline with key markers and outcomes. As a product designer I expect myself and others to discover and address problems and then exit leaving behind change.

Research & Research

If you do not know what and who you are building for, the leanest scrum or the most agile project will not help you. I like to test to the point of routine.

I prefer to record interviews and use dovetail to analyze sentiment afterwards. This keeps me in the moment during the interview and not note taking.

Insights and stories can be produced from this so there can be no debate as to what was discussed. I am not interested in a battle of opinions about what was implied.

Testing, Testing & Testing

I also like to validate to the point of routine. I feel that the work UX teams can do in advance, makes dev sprint cycles easier and eventually reduces pressure on support teams.

Team Design

I have found that team structure makes a dramatic difference to whatever process is in place. designers (ideally with QA and product) at the root of teams makes it a smoother cycle.

Design Thinking ( awful term )

Places like IBM and others have designer at the O level of the business. I think the trend will go that way with designers holding more influence. For me personally, I like to consider all areas of a business withing my reach, I don't mean that I wish them to do what I want thought!

For example, I want to know the issues support teams are having, If 15% of their time is spent on 'how do I do . . ', that issomething a UXer can help with ( research & interviews ). If we can reduce this to 5% month on month then we are improving Product Scores as well as reducing the cost to serve the product.

More Testing

Sorry but I cannot stress it enough! Ideally you include users in the process so the expectation is they will test the product. This of tools like maze which takes your direct wireframes and records flows, correct and incorrect click, click rates, bounce rates and more. It is important to me to never feel like I know better because I don't.