There are many articles online that discuss the importance of experiences. I want to focus on why we believe it is crucial to design potential experiences at the beginning of your product development process. It increases efficiency throughout the project. It allows high-risk solutions to be tested with your users quickly and affordably.
So, what is the user experience? We define it as the user's mindset, their feelings, the steps required to purchase, the product itself, the tasks that are being completed, and the environments all this happens in.
There is a fundamental difference between designing for physical objects versus designing for the people who use the physical object. Designing a product that looks cool or that matches your Visual Brand Language isn't going to cut it. Why would somebody care if your product matches your Visual Brand Language? You do, they don't. They care about how the product affects them.
Understanding the experience you want to create for your users at the beginning of a project is imperative. It creates clarity. When you're driving and you need directions, your destination is required to figure out how to get there. Knowing the user experience is the "destination" for the product development team. It creates consensus, gives decisions purpose, identifies high-value features, and potential technology solutions. It also eliminates low-value features, tangents, and time spent arguing about opinions where no one is right. Most importantly it is the strongest sales pitch you need to get your project funded and moving.
This is not a new idea but a proven approach to successful design. It's been used at Google ventures with companies like Slack and many others. Steve Jobs knew the importance of this. There are videos of him talking to his employees about the user experience driving product and service decisions when he came back to Apple. Nintendo knew they wanted to create a fun and approachable experience that was counter to the Xbox and PlayStation expert gamer experience. Knowing the user experience up front allowed Nintendo to adopt technologies and design interactions that got them to their product destination.
This approach can also identify if the ideal solution should be a product or a system. It may become apparent that designing a system is necessary to create the desired experience. The original iPod is a great example. Apple's iPod was just a music storage device like many other mp3 players. Why did it offer the best digital music product experience? They created an easy and simple way for the user to get new music onto the device. The digital song was a new music format, that was not easily or quickly transitioned from CD to mp3 player. iTunes was the reason the iPod was successful. Apple knew what the experience should be and figured out how to create it. The biggest challenge was negotiating with the record labels to adopt a new and untested platform.
The experience can also be broken down into sections.
As the team progresses through the development process functions or interactions are identified as risky but potentially highly rewarding for the user and the business. Using storyboarding and low-fidelity prototyping allows you and your team to test these experiences without the development cost that could slow you down and eat up a significant portion of the budget. These tools can quickly identify potential solutions and the selected experience can be quickly prototyped and tested with the users. Most experiences can be identified, prototyped, and tested within one or two weeks. Qualitative research is appropriate here. We recommend 5 users. If they are screened properly we will be talking to the right people and getting 85% of the valuable feedback. Five is enough to start to see patterns emerge without redundancy and unnecessary cost. Read about it here: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/
Ok, so if you're convinced like we are, how can you create and document the variety of potential experiences that you want to create for your users? Luckily, it is a simple solution. We use storyboards to quickly visualize new experiences.
Hollywood uses this technique to build their stories quickly and affordably. You can do the same with your product. The amazing thing about it is that you can get feedback from your users before spending significant time and money developing a design. If the idea fails it really is no big deal. The investment was minimal. The failure of an idea is never a waste of time. Lessons are learned and confidence is created from not having thoughts about "what if we did...".
Here are some techniques for storyboarding:
Draw or Act it out and take photos (drawings don't have to be good, they aren't in Hollywood either)
Describe what is happening
Describe what the user thinks and feels
Describe what is necessary to make that scene work
Build a prototype that will create the experience and interaction that is desired. I need to be clear that the goal is not to develop high fidelity components and systems that take months to build. The goal is a functional mock-up. It needs to represent the design.
Use Powerpoint or Keynote to mock up screens and interactions. The goal is to create the perception of a functional product. It has to appear that it works. Do whatever is necessary to achieve that.
Continue to storyboard as you refine and develop your product. Retest your experiences with prototypes to get feedback. New important features or mindsets may need to be adopted, and you don't want to miss them!
Know your product destination. Know where you're going before you start designing.
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