Once you know the requirements of a User Experience (UX) project, you need to establish and propose some potential solution(s) as part of your planning approach. How do you go about coming to a solution?
Techniques for Meeting the Needs of the Business and the Users
The hard work of planning isn’t over once you’ve established the needs of the business and your users; the next step is to determine what kind of solution you will use to address the UX. There is a range of techniques that may enable you to put forward your strategy.
Ideation Workshops
Workshops are by nature a collaborative tool. You can work with your client and other members of the project team to decide which design solutions you’re going to use, and how they will be implemented. The advantage of workshops like this is that it’s much easier to embed UX as part of the core of the project when everyone has their say and a mutually agreed solution is adopted. That’s because once everyone is in agreement on a UX approach, it’s harder for them to resist using that approach without losing face with the rest of the team. However, workshops need to be well facilitated to avoid arguments that carry bad feeling into the project too.
Information Architecture
When you’re building a website or an application you are going to need to handle data in a consistent manner. You’ll need to define how content is delivered and how it is phrased, that labels and fields have consistent naming conventions throughout, that data is grouped correctly, and that navigation is simple and self-explanatory.
You can do this by developing content plans, process flow diagrams, site maps, etc. during the planning phase.
Sketching, Wireframes, Prototypes
These three techniques are a UX designer’s means to develop ideas quickly and then put them through a process of rapid iteration before they enter production. You can work with your users to refine ideas and improve them and to test them.
Usability Tests
If you don’t test your ideas with your users; how will you know if you’ve created a positive UX or not? User tests often offer startling insights into the way a product will be used (and misused in many cases). Users may give you ideas that make your products truly stand out from the crowd. One common misconception is that testing needs to be expensive – this isn’t the case you can employ light-touch techniques to keep costs down.
User Journeys
You can also map the workflow through your product. If you can see the journey the user will take with your product – you can ensure that there are no obstacles in the way and that the journey is as straightforward as possible.
Summary
You have to be able to identify the right solutions at some point during the UX planning phase. These techniques enable you to work with your clients, your users and your technology to ensure that the solutions you put forward are a “best fit”. You do not have to use every technique for every project, but the more you use – the better your UX results are likely to be.
