Why UX Design is essential for business success- Part Two
This is part two post. You can read part one here.
In the first part, I talked about the sweet Spot between Desirability, Feasibility and Viability and why Desirability needs to take the first spot and how Feasibility and Viability can be brought along.
Desirability can be achieved in many ways. One can apply the principle of Lean UX, Design thinking or a four Step UX Process.
All these are well-defined design processes. These processes are rational and forces us to take data-based decisions rather than relying on feelings. Most of the startups fail because feelings and emotions are given far more value. All these design processes are rooted in human psychology. Since I am a student of Design Thinking I will keep that as a context for this discussion.
All these processes sound very theoretical so let’s make this topic interesting by taking a real-world problem and see how Design Thinking can help us.
Case Study: How to make busy people fit.
Let’s assume we did a full round of Design Thinking.
About Design thinking : Its a non-linear, iterative process. Stages in Design Thinking:
- Empathy - Lot of techniques - Mostly Interviewing to discover problems.
- Define - Analysis and Synthesis of problems captured in Empathy Phase to create a human-centred definition. Everyone in the team works towards this problem statement.
- Ideate - Coming up with ideas, evaluating and selecting to create the solution.
- Prototype - Using the idea, creating low and high fidelity prototype.
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Test - Evaluate what you have created. You should never trust your idea.
ImageSource : https://www.interaction-design.org/
During the Empathy and Define phase we found out that the problem of not maintaining fitness is linked to:
- Not planning your day effectively.
- Users don’t know how to cook healthy food.
- Unaware of exercises that can do wonders in the shortest period.
With these problem definitions in hand, we came up with an idea to create an app which educates users on planning better and short exercises. Since diet plays a big role, user will be sent options to order healthy food from outside. This would save time for people who are extremely busy.
The viability of the solution can be determined by the value solution provides. We can analyze who is the person who gets value. In our case, we can come up with a premium offering where exercises are recommended by world-class trainers. Also, we can earn a commission from tie-ups with restaurant providers.
The feasibility of a solution depends on two things:
#1. The content itself - How and where we can get credible content.
#2. Tie up with Restaurants - How can we deliver nutritious food to our customers
With these things in mind, how can we test the feasibility aspect combined with desirability?
Step # 1: Live Prototype
Live Prototype gives us the flexibility of what aspects we want to test. If we have multiple aspects of the feasibility than it would be ideal to start one by one and add more aspects to it. For that to happen we need a set of users who can participate in the exercise. In this case, I would target a set of users belonging from the same geographical location. E.g. targeting a medium-sized apartment complex could be ideal. Our target customer is the one for which we created our Personas. It can be input to our marketing team. If you are a funded company than offering incentive/reward for first-time use will not hurt. It can become part of a marketing campaign.
There can be many ways to market the product, our goal is to test some of the parts of the system.
One of the most critical parts is tie-ups with restaurant owners and listing some of there recipes in our app. With a live prototype, we can test how many users are ordering food from our app. We can also collect feedback that will help us in defining our relation with restaurant owner.
We can upgrade our Live Prototype to have more premium features like Exercise recommendation from qualified trainers. With this, we can offer premium content and test if people are buying it. Discoveries made in Live Prototype can become the basis for doing a Pilot.
Step # 2: Pilot
Live prototypes provide us means to test certain aspects of your solution.
After several iterations of live prototypes, we can decide to do a Pilot. Pilots are about testing the entire system of your solution. It is a step before launching a full-fledged solution. Doing a Pilot gives us a firm idea of how the solution will perform in the long term.
The changes resulting from a finding of Pilot should be kept minimal, the reason is too many changes will affect other parts of the system.
Bringing an idea to life is like eating an Elephant, you eat one bite at a time. I am sure some of you would have seen startups following this kind of approach to reach success.
I feel gone are the days where a company gets hired to do research on people, collect their demographics and do a big marketing campaign to launch the product. The worst part is product failing when it reaches in the hands of people.
The chances of you winning are the most when you start from Desirability. There are so many companies that exist who have not even though about commercial viability and still, they became billion-dollar companies for e.g. WhatsApp, Instagram.
I am not advocating that one should not think about Viability but the secret to success is making the product desirable. It was and it will always be. How you make something desirable is the choice you make.
References