Sean Van Tyne

Product Design: Bridging the Gap between Product Management & Development – Part 1 of 5

I was recently asked by Good Experience to present a webinar on Product Design: Bridging the Gap between Product Management & Development, an article I wrote for Pragmatic Marketer magazine. Here it is (basically)…

Product Design is the bridge between Product Management and Product Development. Product Management quantifies the problems, writes requirements, and validates the solution; Product Design analyzes the requirements, designs the solution, and writes specifications; and Product

Development builds the solution, tests and fixes bugs, and writes documentation.

While Product Management is focused on the market and the customers’ business needs and Development is focused on the customers’ technology needs, Product Design is focused on the customers’ end-user needs. Product Design focuses on the users’ experience and their interaction with the technology.

The customer is the person who decides whether or not to purchases the solution, while the user is the person who uses the solution. For enterprise software, the customer is usually someone in upper or executive management interested in finding the best way to bring efficiency to their operation while the user is typically a company employee more interested in completing their daily assignments as easily and effectively as possible. The customer is looking at the overall workflow of their organization and how specific software solutions might improve it, while the users tend to emphasize the software’s ease-of-use.

For this reason, Product Management, Design, and Development work together to understand the market, customer, and users’ needs, and design and develop technology solutions that meet these needs.

User Experience Balance Scorecard Part 3 of 3

Each perspective of the Balance Scorecard includes objectives, measures of those objectives, target values for those measures, and initiatives, as follows:

• objectives—the major objectives a company must achieve—for example, profitable growth
• measures—the observable parameters a company uses to measure its progress toward reaching its objectives. For example, a company might measure its progress toward the objective of profitable growth by growth in net margin.
• targets—the specific target values for the measures—for example, +2% growth in net margin
• initiatives—action programs a company initiates to meet its objectives

For a User Experience Balance Scorecard, the objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives might look like those shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4—Objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives in a User Experience Balance Scorecard

For each perspective there might be many objectives. Objectives for user experience could include user research, design reviews, and usability evaluation among other user experience activities.

Conclusion

As user experience becomes more established as part of an organization’s overall strategy, a comprehensive Balance Scorecard must include user experience. It would be beneficial for UX leaders within organizations to understand the Balance Scorecard system and how to map their UX groups’ objectives to their organizations’ business strategies.

User Experience Balance Scorecard: Part 2 of 3

With the Balance Scorecard system, an organization can align and manage its key corporate objectives. The User Experience Balance Scorecard maps the user experience process and skills to customer satisfaction and financial growth. At a high level, a User Experience Balance Scorecard might look something like that shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2—A high-level User Experience Balance Scorecard

Notice that the customer objectives of increasing conversions, retention, and wallet share map to increasing revenue and reduced cycle time; reducing training and support costs maps to the financial objectives of reducing costs. Depending on an organization’s overall strategy, you could break down the User Experience Balance Scorecard like that shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3—Objectives in a User Experience Balance Scorecard

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User Experience Balanced Scorecard Part 1 of 3

Customers have experiences with an organization’s products and services regardless of whether the organization is consciously managing them. A good user experience delights customers—increasing adoption, retention, loyalty, and, most important, revenue. And a poor user experience discourages customers from using a product or service and drives them to the competition—eventually, making a product offering unviable.

Smart organizations recognize that providing a good user experience for a product is an essential competitive advantage. They know it is the product’s user experience that forms their customers’ impression of the product—by both attracting and delighting customers and differentiating their product from its competitors. Just look at the user experiences consumer companies like Apple provide. Even government organizations know this is important. Check out Usability.Gov.

Because user experience has become so important to organizations’ success in the marketplace and, thus, their revenue, it is now part of their overall business strategy. Organizations should plan how to manage and measure user experience. Therefore, most organizations have some system for managing their strategy and measuring their progress toward achieving their goals. One popular system for managing and measuring strategy is Balanced Scorecard.

Balanced Scorecard

Balanced Scorecard is a system that aligns specific business activities to an organization’s vision and strategy. Using a scorecard helps organizations balance their strategic objectives across four perspectives:

• Financial—The Financial Perspective examines the contribution of an organization’s strategy to the bottom line. It represents the strategic objectives of an organization in terms of increasing revenue and reducing cost.
• Customer—The Customer Perspective focuses on customers’ satisfaction, which contributes to the organization’s revenue. It represents the value an organization delivers to customers, the value proposition, and the resulting customer satisfaction.
• Internal Business Processes—The Internal Process Perspective is concerned with requirements for products and services that deliver the customer value proposition. It focuses on activities and key processes that are necessary for an organization to excel at providing the value customers expect.
• Learning and Growth—The Learning and Growth Perspective focuses on the internal skills and capabilities an organization requires to support value-creating internal processes. This perspective includes employee training, the development of corporate cultural attitudes relating to both individual and corporate self-improvement, and the technological tools that support these activities.

By understanding the basics of Balanced Scorecard, you can marry your user experience activities to your organization’s overall strategy. One popular user experience design process that can help you do that is activity-centered design.

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User Experience Balanced Scorecard

It is essential to put your design solutions into the context of the market problems they solve, the business objectives they support, and the customer and user needs they meet. Using a “scorecard” helps organizations balance their strategic objectives across various perspectives such as Financial, Customer, Processes, etc. Each perspective of a scorecard can include objectives, measures, initiatives, etc. – whatever is important to the organization.

One of the more popular scorecard systems is Balanced Scorecard. Balanced Scorecard was originated by Drs. Robert Kaplan (Harvard Business School) and David Norton as a performance measurement framework that added strategic non-financial performance measures to traditional financial metrics to give managers and executives a more ‘balanced’ view of organizational performance.

With the Balanced Scorecard system, an organization can align and manage its User Experience objectives along with other key corporate objectives.

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Design Activities, Tasks, Actions, and Operations: Part 3 of 3

Once you’re confident you understand various customers’ workflow, activities, and tasks, it’s time to develop visual design—color scheme, fonts, iconography, branding, and all graphic elements. Visual designers develop the visual design elements that support the company’s brand and enhance the ease of task completion and efficiency.

Medium-fidelity prototypes are developed based on wireframes and visual design. These prototypes encompass screen flow and interaction. Interaction Design defines the behavior of how your customers and users interact with your solution. They focus on the tasks that need to be completed and the actions associated with the task and underline operation. Interaction design is focused on making products more useful, usable, and desirable.

Work with customers and users to conduct reviews of prototypes for feedback. Conduct usability evaluations to measure effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. Be sure to measure task completion, time and task, and the emotional response to your solution.

You can read more in this article – Defining and Designing Technology for People

Design Activities, Tasks, Actions, and Operations: Part 2 of 3

Product designers have tools they use to define activities, tasks, actions, and operations such as activity diagrams, wireframes, and prototypes.

Product Design develops prototypes to elicit customer feedback to validate the solutions activities, tasks, and actions meet their needs. Wireframes are a quick and easy way to prototype a design for feedback. Wireframes are a basic visual guide used to suggest the layout and placement of fundamental design elements in the interface design. They provide a visual reference for the structure of the screens, define the positioning of global and secondary levels of information hierarchy, and maintain design consistency. It is a way to visually represent the activities, tasks, and actions.

With wireframes, designers validate the general workflow navigation, information grouping, information hierarchy, terminology, labels, and general interactions in terms of activities and tasks that need to be complete to meet the customers’ goals. Wireframes and lo-fidelity prototypes, in general, should be void of all color, fonts, icons, graphics, etc. to keep the focus on the overall workflow, activities, tasks, and general information design.

When solving problems for the broader market, these prototypes allow you to validate where various customers’ workflow and content overlap and differ, and start thinking about the right design solution to support the differences in their workflow, activities, tasks, and content.

You can read more in this article – Defining and Designing Technology for People

Design Activities, Tasks, Actions, and Operations: Part 1 of 3

Product designers have tools they use to define activities, tasks, actions, and operations such as activity diagrams, wireframes, and prototypes.

Activity diagrams divide the activities into tasks needed to complete the user’s objective. A task is a unit of work. The task itself may be a single step in the process or multiple steps or sub-tasks that make up the task. Activity diagrams, sometimes called process flow diagrams, divide the scenario tasks as needed to convey what the user needs to do to complete their goal.

Tasks analysis looks at tasks as outcomes that have actions. Actions usually result in some form of commitment. For example, selecting the “OK” button in a software interface or pressing a button on a device that results in a desired outcome. And an operation is the outcome of the user’s action. The operation is the program initiated and yields the results of the user’s intended goal.

You can read more in this article – Defining and Designing Technology for People

Define Who, Why, What, and How: Roles, Goals, Scenarios, and Activities

The product manager must have a concise vision for the product they can clearly articulate to the product designers. Put the customers and users activities in context of the market problem the solution is solving. Markets are made up of segments. We must be able to define our market segmentations in terms of their needs in context of the problems we are solving for them. Both demographic and psychographics help to develop segmentation profiles. Consider the strengths and weaknesses of the competitions’ solution compared to your solution along with how the various customers’ goals, process workflows, activities, and tasks are similar and different. Remember that innovation sometimes means looking at a solution in other markets and adapting it to our own.  The solution’s vision provides the direction for the product’s design.

The product team must follow the vision and not be afraid to ignore findings. Yes, listen to customers, but know when the findings support the vision. Vet assumptions, validate design concepts with customers, and evaluate the solution with customers’ end-users. Review market segmentation demographic data and interview stakeholders, customers, and users, in order to gain insight into their goals. A goal is a result one is attempting to achieve. Observe the customers and users using the solution in their environment and develop diagrams of the various customers’ workflows and note where the goals and underlining activities are similar and different.

Group your customer and user by similar roles based on their goals and the type of activities they perform. A role is a set of connected behaviors. Usually people with the same role have similar job-related responsibilities, duties, and goals.

Once the various roles and goals are understood, think through the scenarios needed to realize the goals. Scenarios describe a user’s interaction with the solution. Scenarios are useful to Product Management to define business cases and useful for Product Design to define user interface design.

Determine what activities are needed to complete the goals by roles. An activity is a specific behavior or grouping of tasks. Develop a diagram that illustrates the activities. An activity diagram is a diagram that shows activities and actions to describe workflows.

You can read more in this article – Defining and Designing Technology for People

Understanding Customer Activities

Dr. Donald Norman has suggested a hierarchical structure of activities, tasks, actions, and operations to better understand our customers’ interactions with solutions. In this model, activities are comprised of tasks, which are comprised of actions, and actions are made up of operations. This “activity centered” philosophy is focused on the activity—not the person.  If a customers’ suggestion fails to fit the design model, it should be discarded. Too many companies, proud of listening to their customers, will include requested features that do not really solve the bigger market problems. Only by observing our customers activities—interactions with our products—do we really understand customer’s needs.

Successful product designers understand their customers’ activities to determine how the solution will best operate. Understanding the tasks of the activities helps understand the customers’ intentions. Focus on activities our customers perform rather than their requests. Systems that support the activities must, of necessity, support the people who perform them.

Successful products are those that of the underlying activity, supporting them in a manner understandable by their target customer. Understand the activity, and the solution is understandable.

You can read more in this article – Defining and Designing Technology for People