We as the #uxstrategy and #design consulting firm always come across a few questions repeatedly some of them I have stated below:
1. What’s the reason for these many hours quoted just for discovering the idea and concept?
2. Why do you need to do user research for all the stakeholders who will be using the application, when we already know how the application should be designed and the functionalities?
3. What’s the use of knowing the user’s persona and their understanding of technology?
Last but not least
4. Do we really need 200-400 hours just for the UX?
We answer these questions every time we come across by every single customer every day.
Q 1. What’s the reason for these many hours quoted just for discovering the idea and concept?
Answer: Discovering phase consists of user research, product-market fit, user persona and user flow/IA of the application. If we don’t spend time in finding gaps of the product, validating the product-market fit, understanding the end users and usage pattern with respect to technology awareness we can’t start designing the application just by assuming things. We need solid insights backing up with data gathered during the whole process, so once it’s in the production we don’t get surprised by any new information which demeans the whole efforts went into the product #design, #Development, #testing, and #deployment.
Q 2. Why do you need to do user research for all the stakeholders who will be using the application, when we already know how the application should be designed and the functionalities?
Answer: We need to do a thorough analysis of all the users to understand the expectation from the product and how each user wants the interaction to happen over the application. For example a couple of months back we came across a requirement of an application where our client was a doctor who wants to create an application for his patients suffering from pain. The challenge was to reduce the data entering within the app as the end users were the patients in pain, we can’t assume that they will be comfortable to put lots of details over the application. We came up with the idea to add gamification to engage users within the app while removing all the data entry intensive tasks from the application instead we designed the application interaction in such a way where the patient has to only tap or drag in order to fill in the details. The end design was not just appraised by all the stakeholders (Patients and Doctors) but by our fraternity as well. Sometimes we need to dig deeper into the end purpose to solve the challenge efficiently and this time we did it with the help of better understanding of user’s efficiency. The end design is entirely different from the client’s perspective when he initially reached out to us. So, the long story short we need to understand the user’s expectation and usability of the application in order to give the best-fitted solution.
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Q 3. What’s the use of knowing the user’s persona and their understanding of technology?
Answer: In order to answer this question, I would like to bring your attention to the above use case again where the patients are in pain and they could be of any educational background. As the interaction was based on the pictorial representation of the body skeleton where they can tap on the point of pain and drag in the next step to evaluate if the pain is increasing from the previous analysis or getting better? This will also give enough insight to the doctors on their patient’s progress. The idea behind this solution to make it more intuitive with the help of gamification so the patients feel motivated to use it every day and doctors can closely monitor the progress and the interaction created to cater this application to patients across all educational backgrounds.
Q 4. Do we really need 200-400 hours just for the UX?
Answer: With all of the above things in place, what should be the expected effort hours required to come up with the best possible solution? The given time is completely justified, why?
Because if we have not researched about the market fit of the product we would have never started to think from this perspective as all of their competitors were having the generic approach towards scheduling the appointment with doctors. This analysis of the USPs makes this product stand out from the rest of the solutions.
If we didn’t have the understanding of educational background and technology awareness of the patients we could have never thought of making the interaction just through the pictorial representation and tap and drag inputs.
On a whole, it’s easy to understand why we need to sharpen our axes before we start cutting the tree.
We at HelloFello believe in looking things in greater details whether it’s the UX of the application or the end product design.
We are conducting UX audit campaign for a limited number of companies where we will be analyzing your application and give you a consolidated report of all the suggestions which will not just improve the user experience within the application but also create better user retention.
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