Implementing a Simple Iterative Design Process with Your Teams
The terms agile, kanban and waterfall get tossed around a good bit when you discuss the topic of process. What it boils down to is the lifecycle of your deliverables for the industry you’re in or targeting. I’ve learned through trial and error that an agile approach needs to tailor itself to the structure and dynamics within your team. While strict agile favors developers, we can introduce a kanban approach for more milestone driven deliverables.
Also known as rapid prototyping, an iterative process aims at utilizing research and a feedback loop with the audience to constantly improve upon a service or product.
The diagram above outlines a simple process. You can see as soon as something is created it’s being shown to user, customers and product owners. You take that feedback and incorporate into the next iteration of your product creating a loop. All the while releasing validated feedback out into the wild.
We’ve seen teams, like Google Design, over the years become more transparent with their process’ with the unveiling of things like the design sprint. As a product designer a 5 day sprint can be engaging and generate a good amount of feedback for the idea or product, but a UX process from end to end requires more of a time investment. Let’s break this process down further and outline all of the pieces required in a UX iterative process. You can see that the flow diagram now becomes an iterative wheel divided into 4 sections Define, Design/Prototype, Evaluate and Analyze. Each section should be considered a sprint, however long a sprint lasts is defined by your team project manager during sprint planning.
Define
During this phase of the process you’ll be gathering requirements and hopefully conducting user interviews. Take your collected data and outline personas and/or empathy maps, user journeys and begin drafting your user stories for user validation that can be shared as deliverables with the development team.
Design and Prototype
Utilize all of your collected data and let it inform design decisions as you begin to sketch, wireframe or prototype the solution. Now would be the time to experiment with ideas that could benefit your end product. Take any ideas that you validate and ship them off to development to build.
Evaluate
Get these ideas in front of your users. Conduct a round of tests, multiple if needed. Assess the user flows and journeys to help create an effective line of questioning and tasks for your test participants.
Analyze
Gather the feedback and share the results with your team and the product owners. What ideas were validated? What are our areas of improvement?
Not only will you see a better engagement with the team, this process shines a light on the importance of testing your ideas with your audience. Gaining insight and validating your ideas with the people you’re building for is incredibly valuable, improves your usability and helps inform the decision making process moving forward. It also benefits the customers in building a relationship with them throughout the process with transparency instead of placing it all in their laps at once.
The next question is usually how and where do I get started with all of this? The great thing is you can implement this process at any point, even if your product or service has already launched. There’s always room for improvement. The earlier you take an iterative design approach in the lifecycle of the service/product, the better. It ends up being more cost-effective in the end.
There are a number of tools out there to help you on your journey. Several of these tools are listed below:
I’m thinking about creating a number of ready made templates for documentation purposes, first of them being a usability plan. If there’s an interest in more documentation templates, I will turn that idea into a series on here.
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