UX without user research is not UX
Understand, explore and materialize
Empathize
To understand what you are trying to solve, you need to understand your users. Are we asking the right questions? Putting yourself in the shoes of the customer (and stakeholder) allows you to think, say, feel, and do as they do. I need to understand my customer’s frustrations, fears, abilities, limitations, reasoning, and hopes.
At this initial stage, we conduct research. In a perfect world, we can interview the user and the stakeholders. Importantly, this stage is about setting aside one’s assumption to gain the user’s insight.
Define
Combine all your research and observe where your users’ problems exist. Create a problem statement.
I helped with a UX study of 300 customers to help illuminate the motives and behaviors of our customers and why they were canceling policies in record numbers. Looking at our results, we saw a true picture of what was actually happening.
The example shown on the left defines how pages are navigated and their relationships.
Ideate
Brainstorming, whiteboarding, and throwing sticky notes on the wall. Bring in everyone from all the different teams and get them to take part. Story mapping is one of the most potent team exercises to build consensus. Story mapping is not about requirements but creating a shared understanding between everyone on the team. Thank you, Jeff Patton.
At Harvard Medical School, the director and I would cover the walls with wireframes. Each page abused with sharpie scribbles and colorful stickies. After we would call the teams in and hold long discussions on deciding what was feasible and what wasn’t. Our lab was a living office rich with ideas, struggles, and solutions waiting to be discovered.
Prototype
User interaction and behavior. How do we know if our ideas will work? A prototype can cost-effectively see what works and what doesn’t. The value of showing if your proposal is feasible and viable is the end of the goal of design thinking. From wireframes to mockups, there is where the paint hits the wall.
At Pall Corporation, we used Axure to create prototypes for machine user interfaces.
On the left, is an exercise used to illuminate low-fidelity concepts to stakeholders for discussion.
Test
Does your solution meet your user’s needs? We won’t know until we get our designs or prototypes in front of them. A/B testing through Optimizely and testing with UserTesting.com are a few ways to get user feedback.
On the right is an example of user interviews I conducted at Rectangle Health, after gathering their complaints, and showing them a viable solution to see what they thought.
Implement
Take everything that was learned, designed, tested, and put into development. From the researcher, designer, dev, and QA, we are now implementing a solution. We now must ask ourselves; did we improve the quality of the experience for the customer?
Technology and trends change daily. Therefore, we will continue to improve the product experience until the customer is happy. As a UX Designer, our job never ends.
The following are projects I’ve worked on and are in production.
Pharma
View Kyowa Kirin Cares
View AboutCTX (Healthcare Providers)
View AboutCTX (Patients)
View interactive symptom checker - CTX
View Sancuso (Patients)
View Sancuso (Healthcare Providers)
View Nourianz (Healthcare Providers)
View Nourianz (Healthcare Providers)