Iterative Design Process (UX for Developers 1/3)
Albana Hoxha
Interfaces & Communication Technologies Student | Product Analyst Associate
Once the needs of the user and the business have been established, the product team will enter an initial planning phase, as depicted in the figure attached tot he article. The team then moves into a cyclical process of defining requirements for this cycle or sprint, followed by analysis, design, and implementation. Once the requirements have been met, the product is deployed either to a live environment or perhaps one for test purposes, and the team can then carry out usability testing and evaluation of the product, which informs the next cycle of the design process.
The benefits of the iterative process is that we are able to reduce the number of usability problems by conducting usability testing sessions, avoiding the negative impacts that can occur by releasing our products untested, with unknown usability problems. It is near impossible to design and build without any usability problems on the first attempt, even with the most experienced designers and developers working on a product. The iterative process is not just doing the same work over and over again, with a vague hope that something improves following that repeated process. It is actually centered around continuous delivery: the ability to build out an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), release that to your users, use that to gather data on how your users interact with it in the real world, and then utilize that data to improve your product.
In today’s world of design and development, there is an emphasis placed on delivering the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to satisfy the core needs of the user to garner feedback in order to improve the product through future releases, and this approach fits very well within the iterative design methodology. With MVPs, we must remember that the keyword is “viable.” Many development teams that keep their focus firmly on efficiency and the ability to deliver can easily lose sight of what is viable to release to the user, and can instead concentrate firmly on the “minimum.” In an attempt to try to change the focus of thedeveloper and the wider team from only developing something viable with the minimumamount of work, some have come to replace the word “viable” with the word “valuable” within the MVP acronym. The intention of this is to shift the focus from the developers on to the users.
?According to Jakob Nielsen, iterating through at least three versions of an interface is recommended, and user testing can substantially improve usability. In four case studies, the overall improvement in usability was measured at 165% from first iteration to last, and the median improvement per iteration was 38%. These measurements can be derived from different metrics during usability testing, such as the reduction in time taken to complete a task, the reduction in number of errors made by the user, or the subjective satisfaction of the user.