How to drive experience outcomes through product design?
This is aimed at those who are dabbling with side hustles, working in startups, transitioning to UX and Product Design or generally just curious about how to be more customer outcome driven.
Based on the insights of industry thought leaders and my work experience applying them, I've distilled the most effective ways to drive customer outcomes through product design. Of course, every situation is unique, so it's important to consider your team's needs and circumstances before diving in.
Learn about your customers and users
This can be done by interacting with your customers directly or indirectly. Usual methods to understand current behaviour and opinions are interviewing, running well-formed surveys, looking at existing product usage data, reviewing customer feedback etc
Mostly you have to wear your research hat and get some good qualitative and quantitive data about your customers and users
A good starting point could be, trying to do 1 customer interview of 45mins duration as a team per week.
Some good practical tips to learn about your customers and users can be found in The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick and Talking to Humans by Giff Constable
Visualise what you have learnt from your interactions with customers
A good technique to visualise what you have learnt or uncovered is to use a living document that many team members can quickly access and understand. The most effective one is a journey map, it's easy to create, and maintain and not hard to read and understand.
The goal should be to capture these important aspects
- Overall stages that the user goes through to reach a goal
- Activities in those stages
- Touchpoints that the user interacts with during those activities
- Their current feelings, sentiments, frustrations, pain points and friction
- Opportunities to improve those friction points
Prioritise the lessons learnt based on impact, user goals and business objectives
I knew that to get it right I was going to have to replicate the viewing conditions of someone from the future, so I grabbed my space helmet from the closet, created a new Figma document, and got to work.
A journey map can quickly help you identify opportunities, pain points, frictions and areas of improvement. At this point using an Opportunity Solution Tree is a good idea.
You can now use any prioritisation framework that works for your team to discuss, debate and agree on what would yield the better value for the time and effort spent doing the work.
I tend to advise using the (RICE) framework to do this as opposed to simple effort vs value quadrants. Give each solution a RICE score (R * I * C/E)
- Reach - How many target audiences are impacted?
- Impact - What is the impact? (Time, Effort, Cost etc)
- Confidence - How confident are you as a team that your solution will yield results? (Start with % and go in depth after a few rounds, I promise, you will)
- Effort - How much effort is it for your team to deliver this solution?
You could also try the Kano model, there are many frameworks to prioritise, so pick one that works for your team. The key thing to remember is to try and see if these are yielding results for your project, product team or business. If not try something else.
Frame risk and hypothesis statements about these lessons
At this stage, you should be able to frame the work items as something that you think will attract your customers to hire your solution so they get the desired outcome. Also, list down the risks associated with pursuing these opportunities.
An opportunity solution tree is a great visualisation technique here, augmenting your prioritisation criteria and score onto these proposed solutions will also help the team to come up with effective experiments that can mitigate risks or validate the hypothesis.
Opportunities with the highest risks and solutions with higher RICE scores could be your most important things to validate using some software-led experiments.
Create software-led experiments leveraging lean and frugal principles with your team (Product, Design and Engineering)
I have observed that most teams find this to be the fun part as they can now get their expertise and skills to effect and come up with a wide range of solutions to see if they can make an impact with any of them. Help the team to get here by framing good how might we or jobs to be done statements.
You could also use the XYZ hypothesis and Pretotyping techniques to quickly validate ideas.
Gather data to support your hypothesis from your software experiments
Let these experiments run, celebrate your efforts and wait for the results to see what has worked and what hasn't. This is the exciting bit, now you have your own data to support your thinking and gain confidence that your team, business and project are making progress towards customer outcomes and moving the needle on the business objectives.
Repeat
You have done one lap, now reflect on this and repeat these steps to see how you are progressing towards your goals.
Note about ways of working
Remember, you can adapt these steps to fit your team's preferred way of working (Agile or otherwise). Just don't let ways of working methodologies or other buzzwords get in the way of understanding your customers and creating great experiences.
You can also find space with the above methodology to keep addressing bugs, tech debt and other work that needs to be done to keep your kitchen bench clean so you can serve your customers well.
Also, keep in mind that your experiments should always align with ethical product design principles. This means considering customer impact on data privacy, inclusion, accessibility, security, compliance, and anything that could make it worse for your customer and your business.