When you understand the people you're trying to reach, and then design from their perspective, not only will you arrive at unexpected answers, but you’ll come up with ideas that those people will embrace. This first phase is all about developing a deep understanding of your users’ goals, needs, pain points and creating success measures around this.
Business objectiveObservation
Feedback
Competitor analysis
User feedback
Journey investigation
Business objective
Understand our user’ goals and success measures. Create a shared understanding of what success looks like for our product team.
Stakeholder interviews
Stakeholder interviews are one-on-one conversations with people who have a vested interest in the success of the product you’re working on. They help establish the foundations for any project by providing valuable insights that would otherwise be difficult — even impossible — to obtain. These insights guide the flow of the entire project, such as business goals, technical constraints, usability problems, and more.
KPI review
That's where KPIs, or key performance indicators, come in. KPIs are quantitative metrics that indicate how effectively you're achieving your goals — and ultimately, how successful your product is. Because as Peter Drucker famously said, you can't manage what you can't measure.
Observation
Detect where key problem areas are in the overall digital experience through observation.
Session videos (FullStory)
Watching user recordings video can highlight an array of interesting use cases, and issues, which may help address the new challenges.
Analytics review
Deep dive into Google analytics metrics, to find usage, time spent etc.
Conversion funnel analysis
Funnel analysis is the process of mapping the flow of website visitors to a set of specific funnel steps that result in conversions or signups. Businesses use funnel analysis to trace the user journey throughout their website, optimize it, and see how many visitors end up in each stage of the funnel.
Feedback
Detect where key problem areas are in the overall digital experience by listening.
User interviews
User interviews have become a popular technique for getting user feedback, mainly because they are fast and easy. Use them to learn about users’ perceptions of your design, not about its usability.
User Interviews: How, When, and Why to Conduct Them
Contextual enquiries
Contextual inquiry is literally inquiry of context. It is a method where participants are observed while they perform tasks and simultaneously talk about what they are doing while they perform them. Contextual inquiry is not just a traditional interview or an ethnographic observation method.
Contextual Inquiry
Customer support feedback
Customer feedback is a fundamental pillar of success. And without a strong customer feedback loop, your customer service strategy is incomplete.
The Only Guide You'll Ever Need
Competitor analysis
Identify and evaluate our place in the marketplace versus competitors. Perform audits and conduct user testing of competing websites and apps; optimally writing a report that summarises the competitive landscape and the opportunities that exist within.
What's a Competitive Analysis & How Do You Conduct One?
Business model canvas
The Business Model Canvas is mix of tools and methodologies related to how “a company creates, captures and distributes Value for its customers, regardless of sector, size and social typology”. Its key assets and all the crucial elements that allow a company to achieve its objectives, not only economic but also social and environmental.
Business Model Canvas: a strategic tool for designers
Design pattern analysis
Design pattern analysis is the process of evaluating a design pattern and determining its strengths and weaknesses. This analysis is used to determine whether or not a design pattern is suitable for a given problem or context. It involves looking at the overall structure of the design and analyzing the components, their relationships, and how they interact with each other. Design pattern analysis can also help identify potential problems that may arise during implementation.
User research
Create reliable and realistic representations of our key audience segments.
Affinity Mapping
Affinity diagramming has long been used in business to organize large sets of ideas into clusters. In UX, the method is used to organize research findings or to sort design ideas in ideation workshops.
Affinity Diagramming for Collaboratively Sorting UX Findings and Design Ideas
Empathy map
Visualizing user attitudes and behaviors in an empathy map helps UX teams align on a deep understanding of end users. The mapping process also reveals any holes in existing user data.
Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking
Journey investigation
Empathetically probe our users' main objectives and journeys, uncovering gaps that may exist in their current experience.
Storyboarding
How storyboards fit within the UX design process, and the steps needed to make a successful storyboard to visualize a workflow, customer journey, or user story.
How to Create a UX Storyboard
Journey mapping
Journey mapping is a process to help you understand a holistic view of the customer experience by uncovering moments of both frustration and delight throughout a series of interactions. Done successfully, it reveals opportunities to satisfy customer pain points, alleviate fragmentation, and, ultimately, differentiate your brand by exposing new opportunities to provide additional value to your customers.
Journey Mapping: 2 Decisions to Make Before You Begin
Task and user flows
Task flow is a single flow completed similarly by all users for a specific action. Ex. Sign Up. Task flows have a singular flow, they don’t branch out.
User flows can start off simple and help determine ‘red routes’ — key user journeys. These can easily evolve into complex flows when there are many conditions and requirements involved. User flows are helpful in hashing out complex flows before building out the product.