Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Just one year ago we had some critical issues in our process: designers never talked to users and stakeholders. We, as a team, didn’t perform usability tests and didn’t research our users. Eventually we accumulated a lot of technical and user experience debt. There are seven steps we’ve made to change our design process for the better that are reviewed in this session. For example, I share how we revived our user research. At the start, designers tried to eliminate UX Debt without talking to the users. We’ve been looking through our product to find different visual and UX bugs and made error tickets in our tracking system. As you can assume, we’ve failed because our insights were not powered by the users. After that we tried to talk to our users about their problems. Designers have conducted a series of interviews, and interface usability tests but didn’t involve the product team in them. The result was not so bad, but a lot of important insights were not included in the backlog. The team couldn’t be sure in the importance of these insights. And finally we’ve started researching with product owners, analytics, and teamleads. For example, we’ve build several CJMs with the team and our users. Now we always focus on involving teams. And it works! Our last usability testing had around ten insights, and three critical issues. Most of them were included in the backlog.