Product Design
My approach to handling 0-1 digital product launches
Product Discovery
- Domain Research
- User Research
- Concepting
Product Delivery
- UI & Interaction Design
- Usability Testing
Domain Research
Purpose
Domain research provides a better understanding of user needs, behaviors, and industry-specific contexts. By identifying trends, analyzing competitors, and understanding user challenges, teams can make informed decisions that prioritize features and optimize experiences. This research fosters empathy, crucial for designing solutions that resonate with users.
Deliverables
- Industry trends
- Terminology / jargon used
- Competitive insights
Process
- Conduct a Listening Tour
Met with key stakeholders, teams and subject matter experts to better understand:
- Historical and current events
- Past experiments, their methods, and results
- Key decision points made
- Sensitivities or constraints by others
- Perform Desk Research
- Develop a research plan, timeline, and objectives
- Gather data from primary and secondary research
- Review behavioral insights on product and past surveys
- Analyze Competition
- Heuristically evaluate the experience of a competing product (assuming the competing product is accessible)
- Read and analyze public reviews of the competing product (assuming they're accessible)
- Compile information about the advertised product: value proposition, description, price, and more
User Research
Purpose
User research allows teams to gain deep insights into the behaviors, needs, preferences, and pain points of the target users. By directly engaging with users through various research methods such as interviews and surveys, teams can understand their customers with greater context, their greatest needs, their habits, and more. Like Domain Research, user research informs the design process, guiding decisions to create intuitive, efficient, and satisfying user experiences.
Deliverables
- Personas
- Job maps
- Taxonomies
- Customer journeys
- Prioritized user needs
- Business & user problem alignment
Process
- Develop Research Plan & Moderator Guide
- Identify the research hypothesis, learning goals (in question form)
- Develop the timeline including prep, estimated coordination timetable, and synthesis
- Describe strategy acquiring research participants
- Develop talking points and questions to be used in the interview
- Create pre- and post- email communication message templates
- Prepare & Facilitate Interview
- Prepare whiteboard canvas with stickies to support interview prompts and mental models (Mural/FigJam for online sessions)
- Facilitate the session and have at least 1 dedicated note taker present (alternative would be an AI-based note taker)
- Synthesize Information & Present Insights
- Compile notes from others and compile all information (including stickies) on a white board
- Cluster like comments and describe relationships between clusters
- Present insights and recommendations to product team and key stakeholders, highlighting salient quotes and next steps
Concepting
Purpose
Assuming the industry or domain is new to me, I will do research on the industry to get familiar with it so that will further assist my future design and research efforts.
Deliverables
- Sketches
- Concept designs
Process
- Brainstorm Ideas
- Workshop ideas with product managers, engineers, and subject matter experts
- Facilitate discussion around ideas to clarify intent and details
- Conduct voting session to build consensus around ideas to test
- Conduct Resonance Testing
- Refine workshop top 3 to 5 ideas for an interview-friendly format
- Facilitate discussion around ideas with customers to test understanding of the problem and our approach to solving it
- Pass/Fail: If all ideas don't resonate with customers, re-evaluate the problem and repeat brainstorming step
- Create Concept Design
- Refine top idea into a demo of the future solution
- Record the simulation of the experience while providing a talk track to describe how the future solution would work
- Survey participants at the end of the video asking for ratings on: importance of underlying job, satisfaction with current workflow/solution, and satisfaction with new workflow/solution
- Pass/Fail: If concept performs poorly (the delta in satisfaction between old and new is too close or performs worse) then review qualitative feedback to understand what's missing from the experience, and redo the concept to address those gaps
- Design the Workflow
Based on feedback from the concept testing, changes to the workflow will be made. Additional detail to the workflow, such as edge case support, will be documented. In collaboration with product and engineering, a final workflow will be produced.
- Diagram the full workflow – start, middle, and end of all tasks – with all actors
- Pass/Fail: Address concerns around cost with product and engineering by revising workflow to support the product budget
UI & Interaction Design
Purpose
Based on the output of the product discovery and requirements generated by the product team, UI & interaction design fully describes the desired customer experience within the appropriate scope. It acts as an alignment tool and visually represents the user stories (agile) or business requirements definition documents (waterfall).
Deliverables
- Interactive prototype
- UI patterns / components
- Design assets & imagery
Process
- Create Paper Prototypes
- Loosely describe the UI and interactions between them for the sake of alignment with the product team before jumping into Figma/Axure
- Test prototype with customers if knowledge gaps on unmet needs remain
- Build Individual UI Components
- Create local components to speed up the design process
- Create and manage branches (Figma only) to support rapid iteration on components
- Connect UI Components & Screens
- Build grid, typography, iconography, color palettes, etc. (assuming no design system)
- Craft animations, micro-copy, error states, and more
- Export Design Assets
- Tag individual assets according to SDLC platform's naming conventions in source file
- Export components and states
- Provide full screens for context
Usability Testing
Purpose
Usability testing helps debug the final experience of the solution. With careful facilitation and task design, product teams will be able to observe glaring gaps in the solution and/or hear powerful feedback from the customer.
Deliverables
- Test plan
- Prioritized Feedback
Process
- Build Test Plan
- Identify the learning goals
- Specify target participants, recruitment incentives, and advertising channels
- Create task scenarios and pass/fail conditions
- Develop talking points and questions to be used in the test
- Recruit Participants
- Conduct outreach
- Coordinate/schedule interviews
- Conduct Usability Test
- Prepare test environment with engineers or interactive prototype
- Facilitate the session and have at least 1 dedicated note taker present (alternative would be an AI-based note taker)
- Capture pass/fail conditions, time on task, observational feedback, and explicit feedback from participant
- Analyze Results & Present Insights
- Compile all data and analyze quantitative measures (ex: time on task) and qualitative feedback (ex: quotes)
- Classify the severity of the design flaws and provide to product team
- Rework future concepts of the product based on insights that are not time-sensitive or uncover new problems
