PRODUCT DESIGN PROCESS : THE MANUAL FOR

DIGITAL PRODUCT DESIGN AND PRODUCT

MANAGEMENT PDF, EPUB, EBOOK

Tiago Franco | 142 pages | 08 May 2019 | Imaginary Cloud Limited | 9789871973644 | English | none
Product Design Process
The definition evolved from simply creating a single solution to a specific problem to a practice where we often need many different solutions,
platforms, and variations to address the same problem. The design thinking behind product development gave way to multiple paths with the same
end-goal. Each leading to multiple areas of knowledge, distinct skill sets, and various techniques. In order to answer the many challenges of
designing a web or mobile product, several approaches have been developed and applied in recent years. However, there is no single technique
that is sufficient on its own and there is no main technique that should be used to the exclusion of others. With this in mind, Imaginary Cloud
developed the Product Design Process PDP , a collection of existing techniques, matured over time by the industry, and chained together to ensure
that the product design team's workflow is as efficient as possible.
What began as a design thinking sprint with a vaguely defined objective, resulted in a well-structured and optimized process, only possible by the
contributions of many professionals and through the creation of numerous iterations. If you are currently building an Agile team, this guide will teach
you the roles of each team member to ensure the success of your product. The Guide to Product Management eBook is a free resource that
provides an overview of the strategic and tactical roles of product management as well as business processes and deliverables for roadmap
development, requirements management, early access program management, and product launch.
The Expertise in Product Management free eBook will teach digital product managers all there is to know about organizing the team for success.
Take the Guesswork Out of Product Management is a guide for digital product managers how to convert trial users to paying customers, measure
the impact of UI changes, prioritize product roadmaps based on change and how to make important decisions when it comes to developing the
product. Every agency needs a good management software to streamline processes, improve management and get a better gauge on overall
agency performance. In this complete guide, digital product managers will get a step-by-step guide to implement new technology at your company
and which technologies world-leading agencies are using to stay ahead of the pack. It discusses how to embrace a data-driven mentality for your
app, which in-app objectives to prioritize according to each stage of your app, which in-app KPIs matter the most for certain stages of your app
and why and how to optimize these particular KPIs.
The Essential Toolbox for Mobile Product Managers is a comprehensive guide for digital product managers who improve their product strategy
and deployment. This free eBook includes a very extensive list of the best blogs to follow, books, podcasts, communities, tools, etc. The Product
Book teachers is for anyone wondering how to become a great product manager. Filled with practical advice, best practices, and expert tips, this
book is here to help you succeed! This book will walk you through understanding your customer and stakeholder needs, researching and tracking
market data, writing effective user stories, analyzing and prioritizing product enhancements using the Kano Model, using the concept of Minimum
Viable Product MVP to validate ideas, measuring and validating product successes or failures and communicating product insights and
performance. Discover what every product manager needs to know about product roadmap prioritization in this eBook.
This guide will help you identify the 3 major roadmap influencers and keeping them front and center throughout the product life-cycle, prioritize
feature requests, bug fixes, and other initiatives; stay in sync with product vision, business strategy, and customer needs and finally, maintain a
focused product development roadmap. Definitely make sure to have a look at some of these books if you want to give your career in product
management a boost and also make sure to check out our guide to Design Thinking for Product Managers. Mask Created with Sketch. Fill 1
Created with Sketch. Group 16 Created with Sketch. Group 7 Created with Sketch. This is the phase in which the main aspects of the business
model and user needs are identified. Here, the UX designer, the visual designer, and the product owner should work closely together.

A Comprehensive Guide To Product Design — Smashing Magazine

What people say can be different from what people do. As much as possible, observe what users do to accomplish their tasks. Minimize
interference. When studying the natural use of a product, the goal is to minimize interference from the study in order to understand behavior as
close to reality as possible. You cannot ignore competitors if you want to build a great product. To be competitive, you need to know what
products are available on the market and how they perform.
Your ultimate goal should be to design a solution that has a competitive advantage. Competitive research is a comprehensive analysis of competitor
products and presentation of the results of the analysis in a comparable way. Research helps product teams understand industry standards and
identify opportunities for the product in a given market segment. A competitor is a company that shares your goals and that fights for the same thing
that your product team wants. There are two types of competitors:. Direct competitors. Direct competitors are ones whose products compete
head to head with your value proposition offering the same, or very similar, value proposition to your current or future users.
Indirect competitors. Indirect competitors are those whose products target your customer base without offering the exact same value proposition.
As a rule of thumb, shoot for identifying the top three direct competitors and obtaining the same number of indirect competitors. Start listing
competitors before doing competitive research. Most likely you will begin to learn about competitors way before you conduct competitive
research. During stakeholder interviews, the product owners will certainly give you a few names of products they see as competitors. Use a cloud-
based tool for competitive research. Tools such as Google Spreadsheet make it easier to share the latest up-to-date research information with a
larger group of people both teammates and stakeholders and ensure that everyone is on the same page.
The aim of the analysis phase is to draw insights from the data collected during the product research phase. Capturing, organizing and making
inferences about what users want, think or need can help UX designers begin to understand why they want, think or need that. Based on the
product research results, UX designers can identify key user groups and create representative personas. Personas are fictional characters created
to represent the different user types that might use a product in a similar way. The purpose of personas is to create reliable and realistic
representations of the key audience segments for reference. Base the persona on real data. It can be tempting to invent some details about
personas to make them attractive. Avoid that temptation. Every bit of the information in the persona should be based on the research.
Avoid using real names or details of research participants or people you know. This can bias the objectivity of your personas. An empathy map is
a visualization tool used to articulate what a product team knows about the user. It forces product teams to shift their focus from the product they
want to build to the people who will use the product. The ideation phase is a time when team members brainstorm on a range of creative ideas that
address the project goals. Product teams have a lot of techniques for ideation — from sketching, which is very helpful for visualizing what some
aspects of the design will look like, to storyboarding, which is used to visualize the overall interactions with a product.
A user journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. A user journey can take a wide
variety of forms depending on the context and business goals. In its most basic form, a user journey is presented as a series of user steps and
actions in a timeline skeleton. A complex user journey can encompass experiences occurring at different time sessions and scenarios:. A scenario is
a narrative describing a day in the life of a persona, including how a product fits into their life. A user story is a simple description of something that
the user wants to accomplish by using a product. Here is a template for user stories:. A job story is a way to describe features. A job story is an
effective technique for defining a problem without being prescriptive of a solution.
Information architecture IA is the structure of a website, app or other product. It enables users to understand where they are and where the
information they want is in relation to their current position. Information architecture results in the creation of navigation, hierarchies and
categorizations. Information architecture would benefit from the involvement of users in the IA development process. Product teams typically use a
technique called card sorting for this purpose. Designers ask users to organize items major features or topics of the product into groups and assign
categories to each group. This method helps you find out how users expect to see information grouped on a website or in an app. Sketching is the
easiest way to visualize ideas.
Drawing by hand is a fast way to visualize a concept — enabling the designer to visualize a broad range of design solutions before deciding which
one to stick with. Wireframes are useful for discussing ideas with team members and stakeholders, and to assist the work of visual designers and
developers. Wireframing acts as the backbone of the product — designers often use them as skeletons for mockups. Keep wireframes simple, and
annotate them. When presenting a wireframe to teams, try to include annotations. Annotations help to create context and quickly deliver key ideas.
Wireframes are hardly used for product testing. Of course, design execution is important, but the idea itself plays a crucial role in the process. A
well-executed bad idea is a big waste of time and energy. So, how do you distinguish a good idea from a bad one?
A technique called a design sprint can help you with that. A design sprint is a five-day design framework for validating ideas and solving challenges.
It enables product teams to build a prototype that they can put in front of users to validate the initial design hypothesis to see if it solves the
problem for the user. The simplest method that requires the least experience and professional knowledge is desk research. It is available for
anyone with a computer with internet access, an account for social platforms, and some time to dig up the pain points of online communities and
find opinions and reviews shared in social platforms, forums, mailing lists, or blog comments. Diary study can also be useful in some cases. If you
want to gather data on a larger scale, you can use online surveys — preferably with a mixture of open-ended and closed questions — that can be
used with qualitative insights from other methods.
Still, we may already have assumptions to validate, and we certainly need to have a well-defined topic and a target group that is interested in our
topic. By the end of the discovery phase, we are likely to have enough insight to synthesize our findings, refine our previous assumptive deliverables
or create new ones by user analysis, define the core problem we want to solve, build themes, and deduce potential fields of action. These exercises
can be used at various points of the product design process. At the beginning, in an assumptive way, it can help with synthesizing the research data
and define the project scope. However, it can also be applied when ideating solutions. The when and how depends on the team, project, and
available insights. User personas are fictional yet realistic representatives or archetypes of our key user groups with certain goals and
characteristics.
We use personas to help us understand and map out the main segments of our users, with their different goals and motivations. We can also use
them to help us empathize with them in order to design a product that is the most suitable for the users. At UX Studio, we create assumptive,
theoretical persona mock-ups at kick-off meetings. If provided, we can use already existing research data, such as survey results, built buyer
personas, or other related market research findings, to start off with, but at this point in the product design process, our personas should be
validated and based on real user research data. Our persona sheets include:. We also add a profile image, name, some personal details, and
demographic data to help with building more empathy and make them easier to remember. There are plenty of methods for synthesizing
information, but we only dig deeper into the ones we use most frequently. You can find our downloadable persona template here.
It is compatible with user personas, so we often use them together. In contrast, JTBD places a more significant emphasis on features. It aims to
discover the reason why people choose a product in order to solve a specific problem and fulfill a need. When the company wanted to increase
the profit on their milkshakes, they first started interviews with representatives of persona groups, the customer types they knew to be the main
milkshake consumers. So they tried another approach. It turned out that people bought milkshakes mainly to keep them full till lunch and entertain
them for the whole journey of driving to work. They also moved the milkshake machine from behind the counter to the front. This way the
customers could easily and rapidly buy a milkshake with a prepaid card when rushing to work and avoid queues.
Solving the real job to be done resulted in a sevenfold increase in the sales of the milkshake. The HMW exercise is a great way to narrow down
problems and discover possible opportunity areas. We are not looking for exact solutions here yet, but rather brainstorm, explore questionable
areas of core challenges while keeping an open mind for innovative thinking. For this to work, first, we need a clear vision or goal. This can be a
Point of View statement based on a deeper user needs discovery. The POV should be human-centered, neither too narrow, to sustain creative
freedom when brainstorming, nor too broad, so it remains manageable.
By synthesizing the essential needs to fulfill, we make a template to create a statement. In short: [User. Once we have the POV statement, we are
ready to form short questions that can launch brainstorming on actionable ideas. For example:. Then we may ask follow-up questions on the
previous questions to examine the angles a bit deeper. By completing HMW sessions, we can get one step closer to forming ideas about exact
solutions and executing the best ones. This can also help with nurturing the creative imagination as we progress in the design process.
Creating mood boards or a brand wheel can be a useful way to summarize our findings and have a point of reference during the next steps.
Depending on how many designers are working on a project, we can share the workload and either work on the same design or split up the tasks
and progress simultaneously. For example, one person does the prototyping while the other is building the design system and hi-fi part. According
to UserTesting, the key to driving sustainable growth is to use customer insights to discover the unique combination of tactics that work for your
product. Intercom on Product Management is a great eBook for on product management. It is a collection of lessons that offers guidance on the
tough decisions product managers face on the daily. This free eBook is great for digital product managers as well as upper-level sales, marketing,
and branding executives. Each author shares an insightful rule to follow to be a successful Product Manager.
Getting Real by 37 Signals is a book about a smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application. Anyone working on a web app —
including entrepreneurs, designers, programmers, executives, product managers or marketers — will find value in this practical book. In this free
eBook, digital product managers can learn practical tips on how run Agile development teams. New Product Development Process For Software
by Dialexa aims to empower product managers and other innovators with additional tools to help them create and realize the full potential of their
product concepts.
This free eBook reveals the true value beta testing delivers to product managers and how you can leverage that value to further your goals while
building relationships with your customers. In addition to that, this resource delivers an additional seven proven best practices that product
managers can use to ensure a successful beta program, as well as ten common pitfalls to avoid. If you are currently building an Agile team, this
guide will teach you the roles of each team member to ensure the success of your product. The Guide to Product Management eBook is a free
resource that provides an overview of the strategic and tactical roles of product management as well as business processes and deliverables for
roadmap development, requirements management, early access program management, and product launch.
The Expertise in Product Management free eBook will teach digital product managers all there is to know about organizing the team for success.
Take the Guesswork Out of Product Management is a guide for digital product managers how to convert trial users to paying customers, measure
the impact of UI changes, prioritize product roadmaps based on change and how to make important decisions when it comes to developing the
product.

Product Design Process: Steps To Designing A Product People Will Love

At UX Studio, we create assumptive, theoretical persona mock-ups at kick-off meetings. If provided, we can use already existing research data,
such as survey results, built buyer personas, or other related market research findings, to start off with, but at this point in the product design
process, our personas should be validated and based on real user research data. Our persona sheets include:. We also add a profile image, name,
some personal details, and demographic data to help with building more empathy and make them easier to remember. There are plenty of methods
for synthesizing information, but we only dig deeper into the ones we use most frequently. You can find our downloadable persona template here.
It is compatible with user personas, so we often use them together. In contrast, JTBD places a more significant emphasis on features. It aims to
discover the reason why people choose a product in order to solve a specific problem and fulfill a need.
When the company wanted to increase the profit on their milkshakes, they first started interviews with representatives of persona groups, the
customer types they knew to be the main milkshake consumers. So they tried another approach. It turned out that people bought milkshakes
mainly to keep them full till lunch and entertain them for the whole journey of driving to work. They also moved the milkshake machine from behind
the counter to the front. This way the customers could easily and rapidly buy a milkshake with a prepaid card when rushing to work and avoid
queues. Solving the real job to be done resulted in a sevenfold increase in the sales of the milkshake. The HMW exercise is a great way to narrow
down problems and discover possible opportunity areas. We are not looking for exact solutions here yet, but rather brainstorm, explore
questionable areas of core challenges while keeping an open mind for innovative thinking.
For this to work, first, we need a clear vision or goal. This can be a Point of View statement based on a deeper user needs discovery. The POV
should be human-centered, neither too narrow, to sustain creative freedom when brainstorming, nor too broad, so it remains manageable. By
synthesizing the essential needs to fulfill, we make a template to create a statement.
In short: [User. Once we have the POV statement, we are ready to form short questions that can launch brainstorming on actionable ideas. For
example:. Then we may ask follow-up questions on the previous questions to examine the angles a bit deeper. By completing HMW sessions, we
can get one step closer to forming ideas about exact solutions and executing the best ones. This can also help with nurturing the creative
imagination as we progress in the design process. Creating mood boards or a brand wheel can be a useful way to summarize our findings and have
a point of reference during the next steps.
Depending on how many designers are working on a project, we can share the workload and either work on the same design or split up the tasks
and progress simultaneously. For example, one person does the prototyping while the other is building the design system and hi-fi part. The
techniques we mention here can be done or can at least be started way before this step.
Remember, this is not a linear process, and it is possible to use these techniques in a different order or at different times of the project timeline. The
ideation phase begins when we have a good understanding of the project goals, and we narrowed down what we want to solve first. If there are
still open questions about what features we should start with, the Kano model and the Impact-Effort Matrix can be helpful aids. User journeys and
customer journeys are tools for mapping out the flows users go through when using a service or an application with one specific task to carry out.
As the output, the customer journey diagram lays out a big table. The columns of the table represent different phases or steps a customer goes
through.
These can be unique in every project, but most customer journeys contain three phases: before, during, and after the usage of our product.
Opposed to customer journeys, user journeys analyze a smaller part of the journey. For example, they are focusing only on what happens in the
application. Such as, during a sign-up process. At UX studio, we mainly use user journeys, but for longer projects with a bigger scope, especially if
there is already existing user data about the customers and there is a journey that goes beyond application usage e. User story creation is a good
way to define features with stakeholders.
Most likely you will begin to learn about competitors way before you conduct competitive research. During stakeholder interviews, the product
owners will certainly give you a few names of products they see as competitors. Use a cloud-based tool for competitive research. Tools such as
Google Spreadsheet make it easier to share the latest up-to-date research information with a larger group of people both teammates and
stakeholders and ensure that everyone is on the same page.
The aim of the analysis phase is to draw insights from the data collected during the product research phase. Capturing, organizing and making
inferences about what users want, think or need can help UX designers begin to understand why they want, think or need that. Based on the
product research results, UX designers can identify key user groups and create representative personas. Personas are fictional characters created
to represent the different user types that might use a product in a similar way. The purpose of personas is to create reliable and realistic
representations of the key audience segments for reference. Base the persona on real data. It can be tempting to invent some details about
personas to make them attractive. Avoid that temptation. Every bit of the information in the persona should be based on the research. Avoid using
real names or details of research participants or people you know.
This can bias the objectivity of your personas. An empathy map is a visualization tool used to articulate what a product team knows about the user.
It forces product teams to shift their focus from the product they want to build to the people who will use the product. The ideation phase is a time
when team members brainstorm on a range of creative ideas that address the project goals. Product teams have a lot of techniques for ideation —
from sketching, which is very helpful for visualizing what some aspects of the design will look like, to storyboarding, which is used to visualize the
overall interactions with a product. A user journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. A
user journey can take a wide variety of forms depending on the context and business goals. In its most basic form, a user journey is presented as a
series of user steps and actions in a timeline skeleton.
A complex user journey can encompass experiences occurring at different time sessions and scenarios:. A scenario is a narrative describing a day
in the life of a persona, including how a product fits into their life. A user story is a simple description of something that the user wants to
accomplish by using a product.
Here is a template for user stories:. A job story is a way to describe features. A job story is an effective technique for defining a problem without
being prescriptive of a solution. Information architecture IA is the structure of a website, app or other product. It enables users to understand
where they are and where the information they want is in relation to their current position. Information architecture results in the creation of
navigation, hierarchies and categorizations. Information architecture would benefit from the involvement of users in the IA development process.
Product teams typically use a technique called card sorting for this purpose. Designers ask users to organize items major features or topics of the
product into groups and assign categories to each group.
This method helps you find out how users expect to see information grouped on a website or in an app. Sketching is the easiest way to visualize
ideas. Drawing by hand is a fast way to visualize a concept — enabling the designer to visualize a broad range of design solutions before deciding
which one to stick with. Wireframes are useful for discussing ideas with team members and stakeholders, and to assist the work of visual designers
and developers. Wireframing acts as the backbone of the product — designers often use them as skeletons for mockups. Keep wireframes simple,
and annotate them. When presenting a wireframe to teams, try to include annotations. Annotations help to create context and quickly deliver key
ideas. Wireframes are hardly used for product testing. Of course, design execution is important, but the idea itself plays a crucial role in the
process. A well-executed bad idea is a big waste of time and energy.
So, how do you distinguish a good idea from a bad one? A technique called a design sprint can help you with that. A design sprint is a five-day
design framework for validating ideas and solving challenges. It enables product teams to build a prototype that they can put in front of users to
validate the initial design hypothesis to see if it solves the problem for the user. After the ideation phase, the product team should have a clear
understanding of what they want to build. To deliver a good user experience, prototyping must be a part of your design process. A prototype is an
experimental model of an idea that enables you to test it before building the full solution. A prototype often starts small, with you designing a few
core parts of a product such as key user flows and grows in breadth and depth over multiple iterations as required areas are built out. The finalized
version of a prototype is handed off for development.
When it comes to prototyping, efficiency is vital. One of the most efficient prototyping processes is rapid prototyping. The process of rapid
prototyping can be presented as a cycle with three stages:. Prototypes range from rough sketches on a piece of paper low-fidelity prototypes to
interactive simulations that look and function like a real product high-fidelity prototypes. A lot of digital prototyping tools today help us to create
prototypes with the least possible amount of effort, but sketching on a paper still remains the most important tool for any designer. The fact that
anyone can participate in the design process makes sketching an ideal tool during brainstorming sessions. Digital prototyping is the process of
creating an interactive design that other people can experience themselves.
Just a decade ago, in order to build a high-fidelity prototype, you actually had to code the solution using programming language. These days,
prototyping tools allow non-technical designers to create high-fidelity prototypes that simulate the functionality of a final product in just a few clicks.
Avoid dummy text. Dummy text, like lorem ipsum, should be avoided in early stages of digital prototyping. Use real content to understand how it
affects the overall design. This free eBook is great for digital product managers as well as upper-level sales, marketing, and branding executives.
Each author shares an insightful rule to follow to be a successful Product Manager.
Getting Real by 37 Signals is a book about a smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application. Anyone working on a web app —
including entrepreneurs, designers, programmers, executives, product managers or marketers — will find value in this practical book. In this free
eBook, digital product managers can learn practical tips on how run Agile development teams.
New Product Development Process For Software by Dialexa aims to empower product managers and other innovators with additional tools to
help them create and realize the full potential of their product concepts. This free eBook reveals the true value beta testing delivers to product
managers and how you can leverage that value to further your goals while building relationships with your customers. In addition to that, this
resource delivers an additional seven proven best practices that product managers can use to ensure a successful beta program, as well as ten
common pitfalls to avoid.
If you are currently building an Agile team, this guide will teach you the roles of each team member to ensure the success of your product. The
Guide to Product Management eBook is a free resource that provides an overview of the strategic and tactical roles of product management as
well as business processes and deliverables for roadmap development, requirements management, early access program management, and product
launch.
The Expertise in Product Management free eBook will teach digital product managers all there is to know about organizing the team for success.
Take the Guesswork Out of Product Management is a guide for digital product managers how to convert trial users to paying customers, measure
the impact of UI changes, prioritize product roadmaps based on change and how to make important decisions when it comes to developing the
product.
Every agency needs a good management software to streamline processes, improve management and get a better gauge on overall agency
performance. In this complete guide, digital product managers will get a step-by-step guide to implement new technology at your company and
which technologies world-leading agencies are using to stay ahead of the pack. It discusses how to embrace a data-driven mentality for your app,
which in-app objectives to prioritize according to each stage of your app, which in-app KPIs matter the most for certain stages of your app and
why and how to optimize these particular KPIs.

The 25 Best Free eBooks for Digital Product Managers

This is the reason why product management is becoming the new training ground for future tech CEOs. You want to remember these eBooks? No
problem! Download the full list. According to the researchers, this is study created to help mobile product managers understand how their jobs and
mobile products stack up against their peers, along with tips for improving technical skills, measuring success, facing challenges, and how to get
ahead. This eBook looks at the challenges and opportunities facing the development of usable enterprise software today and contains templates as
well as step-by-step guidance based from real-life examples. This is a broad field, and we also wrote some topics about it if you need a quick into:
The most important UX Rule. According to UserTesting, the key to driving sustainable growth is to use customer insights to discover the unique
combination of tactics that work for your product.
Intercom on Product Management is a great eBook for on product management. It is a collection of lessons that offers guidance on the tough
decisions product managers face on the daily. This free eBook is great for digital product managers as well as upper-level sales, marketing, and
branding executives. Each author shares an insightful rule to follow to be a successful Product Manager. Getting Real by 37 Signals is a book
about a smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application. Anyone working on a web app — including entrepreneurs, designers,
programmers, executives, product managers or marketers — will find value in this practical book. In this free eBook, digital product managers can
learn practical tips on how run Agile development teams. New Product Development Process For Software by Dialexa aims to empower product
managers and other innovators with additional tools to help them create and realize the full potential of their product concepts.
This free eBook reveals the true value beta testing delivers to product managers and how you can leverage that value to further your goals while
building relationships with your customers. In addition to that, this resource delivers an additional seven proven best practices that product
managers can use to ensure a successful beta program, as well as ten common pitfalls to avoid.
If you are currently building an Agile team, this guide will teach you the roles of each team member to ensure the success of your product. The
Guide to Product Management eBook is a free resource that provides an overview of the strategic and tactical roles of product management as
well as business processes and deliverables for roadmap development, requirements management, early access program management, and product
launch.
The Expertise in Product Management free eBook will teach digital product managers all there is to know about organizing the team for success.
Take the Guesswork Out of Product Management is a guide for digital product managers how to convert trial users to paying customers, measure
the impact of UI changes, prioritize product roadmaps based on change and how to make important decisions when it comes to developing the
product. Every agency needs a good management software to streamline processes, improve management and get a better gauge on overall
agency performance. Unfortunately, this scenario happens all too often. In most cases, this has negative consequences. Action without vision is a
nightmare. Every design project needs a product vision that sets the direction and guides the product development team. Vision captures the
essence of the product — the critical information that the product team must know in order to develop and launch a successful product.
Being clear about the boundaries of your solution will help you to stay focused when crafting your product. But vision is only half of the picture.
The other half is strategy. You can plan your route toward the target destination by focusing on exactly what you need to build. By setting the goal
the challenge , you can adjust the direction of your product efforts. Spending time and money on vision creation is a worthwhile investment because
this phase sets the stage for the success of a product.
Value proposition helps the team and stakeholders build consensus around what the product will be. As the name suggests, the product team starts
with target users and works its way back until it gets to the minimum set of requirements to satisfy what it is trying to achieve. While working
backwards can be applied to any specific product decision, this approach is especially important when developing new products or features. For a
new product, a product team typically starts by writing a future press release announcing the finished product. Such a press release describes, in a
simple way, what the product does and why it exists. As with any other press release, the goal is to explain to the public what the product or new
feature is and why it matters to them. The press release should enable each team member to envision the future product. Defining explicit success
criteria — such as expected number of sales per month, key performance indicators KPIs , etc. This also helps to establish a more results-driven
process.
The kickoff meeting brings all the key players together to set proper expectations for both the team and stakeholders. Once the product vision is
defined, product research which naturally includes user and market research provides the other half of the foundation for great design. To maximize
your chances of success, conduct insightful research before making any product decisions. Remember that the time spent researching is never time
wasted. Good research informs your product, and the fact that it comes early in the design process will save you a lot of resources time and money
down the road because fewer adjustments will need to be made. Plus, with solid research, selling your ideas to stakeholders will be a lot easier.
Product research is a broad discipline, and covering all aspects of it in this article would be impossible. As product creators, our responsibilities lie
first and foremost with the people who will use the products we design. Good user research is key to designing a great user experience.
Conducting user research enables you to understand what your users actually need. What it comes to product research, researchers have a few
different techniques to choose from. Gathering information through direct dialog is a well-known user research technique that can give the
researcher rich information about users. Interviews are typically conducted by one interviewer speaking to one user at a time for 30 minutes to an
hour. Surveys and questionnaires enable the researcher to get a larger volume of responses, which can open up the opportunity for more detailed
analysis.
While online surveys are commonly used for quantitative research, they also can be used for qualitative research. The answers to such questions
will be very individualized and in general cannot be used for quantitative analysis. Online surveys can be relatively inexpensive to run. Contextual
inquiry is a variety of field study in which the researcher observes people in their natural environment and studies them as they go about their
everyday tasks.
The goal of contextual inquiry is to gather enough observations that you can truly begin to empathize with your users and their perspectives. What
people say can be different from what people do. As much as possible, observe what users do to accomplish their tasks. Minimize interference.
When studying the natural use of a product, the goal is to minimize interference from the study in order to understand behavior as close to reality as
possible. You cannot ignore competitors if you want to build a great product. To be competitive, you need to know what products are available on
the market and how they perform. Your ultimate goal should be to design a solution that has a competitive advantage. Competitive research is a
comprehensive analysis of competitor products and presentation of the results of the analysis in a comparable way.
Research helps product teams understand industry standards and identify opportunities for the product in a given market segment. A competitor is
a company that shares your goals and that fights for the same thing that your product team wants. There are two types of competitors:. Direct
competitors. Direct competitors are ones whose products compete head to head with your value proposition offering the same, or very similar,
value proposition to your current or future users. Indirect competitors.
Indirect competitors are those whose products target your customer base without offering the exact same value proposition. As a rule of thumb,
shoot for identifying the top three direct competitors and obtaining the same number of indirect competitors. Start listing competitors before doing
competitive research. Most likely you will begin to learn about competitors way before you conduct competitive research. During stakeholder
interviews, the product owners will certainly give you a few names of products they see as competitors. Use a cloud-based tool for competitive
research. Tools such as Google Spreadsheet make it easier to share the latest up-to-date research information with a larger group of people both
teammates and stakeholders and ensure that everyone is on the same page. The aim of the analysis phase is to draw insights from the data
collected during the product research phase.
Capturing, organizing and making inferences about what users want, think or need can help UX designers begin to understand why they want, think
or need that. Based on the product research results, UX designers can identify key user groups and create representative personas. Personas are
fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might use a product in a similar way. The purpose of personas is to create
reliable and realistic representations of the key audience segments for reference. Base the persona on real data. It can be tempting to invent some
details about personas to make them attractive. Avoid that temptation. Every bit of the information in the persona should be based on the research.
Avoid using real names or details of research participants or people you know. This can bias the objectivity of your personas. An empathy map is
a visualization tool used to articulate what a product team knows about the user. It forces product teams to shift their focus from the product they
want to build to the people who will use the product.
The ideation phase is a time when team members brainstorm on a range of creative ideas that address the project goals. Product teams have a lot
of techniques for ideation — from sketching, which is very helpful for visualizing what some aspects of the design will look like, to storyboarding,
which is used to visualize the overall interactions with a product.
A user journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. A user journey can take a wide
variety of forms depending on the context and business goals. In its most basic form, a user journey is presented as a series of user steps and
actions in a timeline skeleton. A complex user journey can encompass experiences occurring at different time sessions and scenarios:. A scenario is
a narrative describing a day in the life of a persona, including how a product fits into their life. A user story is a simple description of something that
the user wants to accomplish by using a product. Here is a template for user stories:. A job story is a way to describe features. A job story is an
effective technique for defining a problem without being prescriptive of a solution.
Information architecture IA is the structure of a website, app or other product. It enables users to understand where they are and where the
information they want is in relation to their current position. Information architecture results in the creation of navigation, hierarchies and
categorizations. Information architecture would benefit from the involvement of users in the IA development process. Product teams typically use a
technique called card sorting for this purpose. Designers ask users to organize items major features or topics of the product into groups and assign
categories to each group. This method helps you find out how users expect to see information grouped on a website or in an app. Sketching is the
easiest way to visualize ideas. Drawing by hand is a fast way to visualize a concept — enabling the designer to visualize a broad range of design
solutions before deciding which one to stick with.
Wireframes are useful for discussing ideas with team members and stakeholders, and to assist the work of visual designers and developers.
Wireframing acts as the backbone of the product — designers often use them as skeletons for mockups. Keep wireframes simple, and annotate
them. When presenting a wireframe to teams, try to include annotations. Annotations help to create context and quickly deliver key ideas.
Wireframes are hardly used for product testing.

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