Design / Redesign

In Design Management Institute's August eBulletin:

Designing from the User's Experience

Analyzing customer needs and market trends are essential competencies for managing complex design projects. However, after confirming user needs through market research, design teams often focus on the product, neglecting users until completing the product, or at best, usability testing. From consumer goods to websites, many design-driven projects limit front-end analysis to market research, focus groups, or concept demonstrations. While these approaches are necessary, they overlook the opportunity for designing from understanding the user’s authentic experience.
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Closing with:

While user experience interpretations may not guide every product decision, they lead to deeper recognition of a product’s meaning to people, and show the drivers behind observed behavior and trends. In managing design research, we want valid user feedback to evaluate products. UX is highly pragmatic, and design managers may appreciate the actionable results from a UX research and design approach.

In summary, several guidelines are suggested from these points:

• Consider whether UX makes sense in your environment and organization. Ask designers and researchers what they know of the concept, and what it means to your product design process.

• Expand your concept of “user” to embrace the work practices and lifestyles of the customer for whom you are designing products. Invest in research that reveals their authentic experience. Use rapid ethnography, field research, and in-depth onsite evaluations to understand the context of work or engagement within which your product will be adopted.

• Use research methods that fit your projects and organizations. Review the methods used by innovation leaders in your industry to advance your UX research practices. Select from these to inform product decisions during the design process (use brief, iterative phases or parallel customer research if necessary to manage scheduling).

• Find ways to (simply) communicate the in-depth discoveries about your users and communities. Draw up personas (profiles), workflow scenarios, and rich pictures from your research findings. Build a user experience knowledge base that contributes to new design thinking from your team “living with” representations drawn from real user experience.

• When researching user experience, consider all the touchpoints and interactions surrounding the product, including its initial discovery, the initial interpretations about its use, and the impact of brand on experience and perception. Learn about the full lifecycle of customer experience - how the product will be found, shared, reused, or returned to over time.

It takes time to introduce new approaches and absorb new methods and design languages such as those developed from UX. Learn what elicits the best results from your user constituency, Allow your teams time to integrate user experience approaches into processes and projects. A repeatable UX process specifically designed for your business needs becomes a powerful competitive advantage.