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 By Brennan Carlson
As we address designing and developing Lyris’ products to predict and improve the user experience, I’d like to discuss a few concepts that are important to understand:
- Keeping users central throughout the design and development process.
- Guiding principles and user interface patterns of user-centered design.
- How we focus on value to lead the market with innovation.
Keep Users Central Throughout the Design &
Development Process
Marrying agile development with world-class user experience design is not a trivial pursuit. Agile development is generally a reactive process, measured by iterations or “sprints” which deliver functionality in 1-4 week period of time. The key in agile development is to never get too far ahead of your customers to make a directional change, or to incorporate feedback. On the other hand, design is generally predictive. To get design right, you have to have a fairly solid design concept, and understand the variables that will drive a successful user experience.
How do we do this? We validate during the entire process. Before any development begins we spend significant amount of time alongside our users. We use low fidelity mock-ups or interactive clickthroughs of how the product should be developed to deliver that value. Our goal is to deliver features that are useful, usable, and delightful for our users. From the start we also focus on getting a Minimally Viable Product (MVP) into a user’s hands as soon as possible to determine if we are delivering value. This is similar to the concept of LEAN manufacturing. We can identify and assess bottlenecks by getting the product into testing immediately. The MVP needs to use real data and be deployed in a production environment and not a pseudo environment, as pseudo environments may produce results that can be misleading in both information and user experience.
Speed of iteration often times is the key here, as opposed to quality, as customers are providing immediate feedback. It is critical to correctly measure end user adoption and usage of the features. During our process, quantitative and qualitative information is captured about “what, when, why and how” the feature is being accessed and used.
Guiding Principles and Patterns of Design
Understanding the difference between our users and what functions they need in order to go about their jobs helps us determine how the product will be used. We use personas and mental models as aides during the design process. For example a CMO uses the product very differently than a field marketer. We ask the questions: How do they go about their jobs? What are their priorities? What are the 3 things they do before they perform a key action and what are the 3 things they do after it? What drives user behaviors? What do they like, what do they not like?
Understanding interface patterns that are familiar, as well as newly defined Rich Internet Application patterns, is important. We’ve experienced a renaissance in technology and design over the last several years, which has resulted in richer interactive interfaces on the Web. Certain elements of design are increasingly prevalent and are just better than what existed before. Keeping up with the latest and greatest is critical as these patterns help users interact comfortably with the systems.
It is also important to design using real data, in a real environment. There is a difference if a customer is addressing 6,000 contacts versus 600,000. A production environment ensures a real experience and gives you the feedback needed. If you don’t design and develop this way, you won’t get it right.
Remember to prioritize context over consistency. In the case where you are trying to help the user accomplish a task, it is better to design for the context than to make the application fit the function - and solve discoverability by removing distraction. Focus on the one thing you want a user to do then remove the additional clutter around it so they can do that one task.
Design for mobile first. With mobile apps, you have much smaller real estate on the screen and an audience that is on the go. Understand the minimum function and features a user needs on an application to perform the required workflow. Take the lessons learned from mobile on feature and functionality and apply them to a Web-based application.
Focus on Value to Lead the Market with Innovation
Ultimately, maintaining a focus on value and being able to lead the market with innovation is always going to be at the forefront over operational execution of development, design and doing the right thing. No matter how wonderful your design, features and functionality are not important if you are not offering value. We aim to delivery simplicity over all else. Users have been inundated with choices and complexity. Providing an environment of comfort and active feedback is critical in being able to deliver this value.
We live in a world that is expecting cross device experiences – so all devices need to be addressed. When designing for mobile, Fitt’s Law applies, “the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance and the size of the target”. In other words, step away from the screen. Understand who is using which devices and how to develop and design for those. We want to make things easy.
Finally it’s vital for us to meet the broadest market relevance. This means that we are designing and developing applications that serve the needs and create value for the Fortune 25 all the way through the Fortune 5000. We build applications that are relevant and useful to solve the tough problems.
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About the Author
Brennan Carlson (@brennancarlson) is VP Of Product Management at Lyris.
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