Deploy, Measure, Iterate: Design Thinking Transformation
Part 6 of 8 on Design Transformation
Experience designers are regularly comfortable to ship a product, design, feature, etc. much sooner than business stakeholders. We want to get something in our users' hands, observe and iterate quickly - ensuring our work is human-centred. The above quote from Reid Hoffman* may be a bit aggressive for companies outside of Silicon Valley but organizations should listen. It's common the business let's perfect get in the way of great and in the time wasted not getting user feedback a more sophisticated business is first to market. First to market definitely isn't everything, as Stephen Beck* of Engine Digital* once said to me,
It's better to be first best, than first.
I agree and examples like the iPhone, Netflix, and Casper prove this. To become first best an organization needs to adopt the Minimum Valuable Product philosophy. I'm sure many reading this are thinking, "uh oh, typo - it's most viable product not valuable." It's not a typo.
Minimum Viable Product means it works but kind of sucks. Design thinking practices means a small percentage more effort to create a Minimum Valuable Product that users will love.
The well loved and accepted example of skateboard, bike, car* does the best job communicating the value of minimum valuable product design. The goal of most products is to get from A (current-state) to B (future-state). Delivering products that achieve this goal iteratively increases the success rate dramatically. For example, getting from A to B using the first example is awkward and takes a long time before any information is collected. Organizations taking this approach can't test or validate their hypotheses until the end because getting from A to B with just a wheel, or the body of a car isn't possible. In this example a poor assumption, or even a decent one that has an unexpected outcome can be very expensive.
The second example shows the value of iterating from skateboard to bike to car. A skateboard can go from A to B while the organization learns from this early product. If the product isn't meeting guest need then the team can iterate and design a more effective option based on guest input: a bike. A bike may be all your guest needs and they're thrilled with the solution. In this case, which is common, there is now time and budget to devote to innovation - inventing the future and building things your guest doesn't even know they want yet.
Another principle I live by is
Better is always better
Through running businesses and my career in experience design I've heard 'no' and have been proven wrong a lot. This experience has helped develop my emotional intelligence, positively affected my ego, and given me confidence in what I do. As such, I'm always open to a better option.
A/B testing is an excellent way to allow users to communicate what 'better' looks like to them. Developing hypotheses to disprove (rather than the common error of trying to prove your hypos) and testing into what performs best ensures you're creating guest obsessed experiences.
In this simple example we'd be testing the colour of a CTA, then the position, and finally if supplementary information has a positive effect on performance. Of course this is an extremely rudimentary example and I'm sure the data science community is having a good laugh but I'm sure the point is clear.
I first came across the quote
If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.
in a TED Talk by Brene Brown*. Obviously it's amazing, as much of Brene Brown's output tends to be. Determining what should be measured, what an organization can do with the collected data, and setting up the data collection in advance is part of the design process.
As someone who loves qualitative data I must also share
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
Quantitive and qualitative data must be collected and synthesized for a complete understand of what is going on. Often what people say and do are in conflict and only by using all data sources available, even the mushy qualitative one, will your team be able to get a complete view of your users and what your organization can do for them.
Next Post:
Design Thinking Is Good For Business
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Make Space For Design Thinking
This series and other content is also available on Medium here: https://uxdesign.cc/the-business-of-design-thinking-2c73b388e444
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