How to find where your UX is broken and prevent it from happening again?
Constant rush and limited resources are usual companions of startups. Those constraints naturally lead to sacrifices along the way and often UX is one of the major ones. As a result, we might have a product that hopefully has a product/market fit but still has a broken user experience.
Now, this article can help to answer the following questions:
- How to find existing UX issues?
- How to prevent major user experience flows in the future?
So, what is the secret weapon?
First, ask yourself and your peers about who are our users and why are they using our product. Understanding a user’s portrait and goal will be a fundament for our user journey map.
I highly encourage you to reach departments not directly involved with the development process, but still, know users more than you. While you, as a designer might have 2 or 3 conversations with customers a week at best, success and sales teams have at least 20–30 per day. This was a great discovery in my case at least, as my assumptions were slightly out of a chart, whereas predictions of our front-office were confirmed with customer interviews later.
The process:
- Start with a simple version of the map, build steps from the beginning until users reach their goal.
- Have an interview session with around 5 customers, ask them to rate their experience for each step of your map, from A to F (with A being delighted and F being frustrated). The important thing here is to get the answer to Why? behind their response.
- Combine the interview results with the map.
You will have a clear picture of where the user experience is having trouble. A good rule of thumb here is to prioritize touchpoints causing frustrations and try to reach a neutral point.
As Jared M. Spool explained reaching delight is another process:
Improving the design from the neutral point to introduce delight is a different process. It’s additive, whereas getting to the neutral point is reductive. We have to know what to add to make the experience become delightful.
You can learn more about how design can reach delight from his article.
How to pitch UX improvement items to executives?
Having a list of main frustration points might not be enough for stakeholders to allocate resources, after all, we are still in a startup.
Before pitching try to review the experience of different personas, as they might have different goals. Segmented analysis can identify several values of your product and execs like to support big initiatives.
This is where you need to know how to speak in their language — spreadsheets. Ask someone with expertise in analytics to review your research and find if those UX improvements can help the company to reach the North Star. Having all that in spreadsheets would help execs to clearly see the importance of the problem and potential benefits. This will expedite decision-making and increase the possibility of getting the necessary support.
We’ve performed the whole process with our product, as a result, we increased conversion in our key marketplace-related funnel, along with improvements throughout the product. We found that having such a high-level journey map reviews twice a year is suitable for our needs.
How to prevent major user experience flows in the future?
Including journey maps at the beginning of the design process will also help your team to understand and review user’s interactions through the whole experience in a holistic way.
It’s important to add the story of interaction, as it helps to understand possible frustration and confusing points. Usually, it would take 2–3 hours to have an initial version of the user’s journey. Reviewing it with the team early on, even before wireframes, would help to identify most of the pitfalls and avoid the waterfall.
I suggest you have it very simple, to gather feedback ASAP.
Customer journey maps proved to be a great tool whether to identify where your user experience limps or to bring it to the next level from the start.
