Case Study
Human-Centered Design Thinking
Problem
Our competitors are beating us with more cutting-edge solutions. As a UX Team, how can we be better, faster, and more creative in solving our users’ problems?
Our design approach is too “safe”. We often feel like we’re playing catch-up and we’re mimicking features that are already familiar in the market.
Hypothesis
If we review our product design process and refine our fundamentals, we can equip ourselves to solve user problems first, rather than simply compete with familiar features.
We’ll design better, faster, and have more fun doing it.
My Role
As Senior Content Designer, my role was to team with key leaders to integrate design-thinking and Content Design into our product development process.
Together, we established:
a process for documenting, updating, and implementing user personas.
an improved Discovery Phase of our product design process.
integrated roles and responsibilities of the Content Design team.
This is a 3-part case study.
Jump to the results.
Initiative One: Understand Our People
What We Did
Task: Better understand our customers through establishing user personas.1) Measure What We Already Know
We knew that the first place to look for answers was with our customers. We needed to revisit and refresh our team’s knowledge of who our customers are. Our leaders all had confident viewpoints, but those viewpoints didn’t always align. We needed to make their implicit knowledge explicit.
We started with gathering all of the information of what (we thought) we already knew. We held multiple internal interviews, and we compiled all existing research and institutional knowledge that we could find.
2) Research Best Practices
In terms of building personas, there are firmly established best practices. We researched those latest best practices and case studies of organizations using personas successfully. We learned from what’s already worked.
3) Build a Persona Template
As a team of only two people on this initiative, we didn’t want to design in a silo. Instead, we created a template persona. Based on what we already knew about our customer, we built a structure that included key information as well as gaps that we wanted to fill.
The first image here is a sample of some of the key pieces that we included in the template.
Our goal was to get to a shared understanding among our entire UX Team of who our customers are. Our approach was to create a template as a tool to structure our colleagues’ thinking. Then we workshopped on it.
4) Lead Design-Thinking Workshops
The template served as a tool to guide team workshops. Working from these tools, we lead our UX Team in a series of workshops to complete these persona templates and come to shared and documented understanding of who our users are.
This is a sample of a workshop exercise that we did to understand the ‘voice of the customer’.
This is a sample of a workshop exercise that we did to map our users’ values. A map like this gives clarity to users’ priorities in our products.
Initiative Two: Solve Real Problems
What We Did
Task: Review our product design process to find and improve on our most important opportunities.1) Understand What Already Exists
We needed to step back and take a bigger-picture look on our design process. We already knew that we needed to improve our Discovery phase of design. But before we could change anything, we first needed to have a deep understanding of how we’re already operating. We did that through internal research and stakeholder interviews.
2) Draft Proposals for Change
Within the new proposals, we needed to be both conceptual and practical. On the practical side, we clearly defined new responsibilities of key roles in our Product Design Cycle. We identified exactly where those roles can have more influence and how those changes would lead to better solutions for our users’ problems.
3) Define New R&Rs
After reviewing our existing process, we identified many opportunities for improvement. We sanity-checked each of those findings with key leaders of the UX Team. With their direction and support, we refined final proposals for why and how to expand our Discovery phase.
4) Socialize and Document Decisions
We presented the proposals across the UX Team in order to gather broad support. Then, we then updated our process templates in order to add more fidelity to the Discovery Phase. The new roles are continually becoming more familiar, expected, and embedded.
This is a familiar sketch of what an ideal product design cycle might look like. It includes a precise “user challenge”. There’s a generous Discovery phase to understand and define the challenge before any specific solutions are explored.
This is a revised version of the “ideal” to highlight the difference in how our design cycle was actually operating. Rather than a user challenge, we started with an idea for a new feature. If we had any Discovery phase regarding that idea, it was typically short and constrained.
Initiative Three: Use Our Content Designers
What We Did
Task: Integrate the new role of Content Design into the UX Team's routine processes.1) Adopt Tools to Guide Abstract Discussions
We were already making changes to the Discovery Phase of design. We took advantage of that growth by integrating specific tools to be used for Content Designers. With those practical tools, we were able to create explicit roles for every person involved, including the new role of Content Designer. The tools helped formalize the integration of Content Design.
The central tool we used is what we call our Product Brief. The template was inspired by the Lean UX Canvas, but adapted to fit our team. Below, there’s a revised sample similar to what we use.
2) Embed Early Content Creation
We wanted our new position of Content Designer to have a couple of primary roles in the design process: to draft content strategy and write content requirements. Our goal was to get those outputs from Content Designers earlier in our design process. In order to do that, we focused on user stories.
Our team was already using user stories to write other design and technical requirements. We fit that existing format as the way to shape our new content requirements. In that way, it felt like we were making fewer sweeping changes to processes, but the changes had big impact.
Our new Product Brief template was our anchor to keeping conversations in the Discovery phase focused on the most important outputs.
While we were exploring exactly where and how to include our Content Designers early in the design process, we found user stories to be a perfect vehicle for documenting content requirements. And this was a framework that was already in use with the rest of the team. It was a win-win.
3) Create Space for Complementary Roles
The new role of Content Designer broke off from work that was originally done by Product Designers. One of our challenges in integrating Content Design was how to create distinct but complementary roles for both Product and Content Designers. What was originally one role now had to co-exist with another.
One of the ways that we helped that effort was by adapting our Figma project template to create a dedicated space for Content Design research, UX drafts, and comments. This was one small but mighty effort that helped us not step on toes.
Results
Our design team is more engaged and empowered. We’re actually designing, rather than painting by numbers.
We did a significant amount of education and socializing on how our product design cycles can work better. Through that work, we’ve gained more leadership support to involve all designers in early conceptual thinking – Product Designers and Content Designers. Previously, we had closed-door discussions and a design hand-off with firm project requirements. Now, more and more, we have collaboration in design-thinking workshops.
Of course, the refinement effort is still on-going, and will be indefinitely. (We’re a work in progress, always.)
Ultimately, we’ll see the results in our users’ satisfaction.
We haven’t followed our upgraded process long enough to be able draw a clear link to user results. One of the successes, though, is:
With more time in Discovery, asking tougher questions, and truly designing, we’ll be much more likely to measure those results through validated user testing.
Eventually, we will have real data to know if and how much these changes have made us more innovative designers. And we’ll continue to tweak from there.