UX Value Proposition & ROI...
Much has been written about employing design thinking as a solution in the problem space domain. When utilized, the qualitative methods provide an insight into human behavior emotions, personality characteristics, needs, desires, and routines. The discovery of these insights are critical to the customer experience because integration can provide a frictionless digital experience that aligns with their day-to-day interaction across multiple platforms.
At the same time, the value of UX in the business strategy planning has been perplexing to executive leaders due to their lack of understanding thought leadership in the big picture. Also, user experience practitioners have to provide metrics that can be utilized with a strong conviction to focus on the cognitive empathy of customer experience in terms business leaders can understand. With the alignment of business strategy and UX values, a deeper appreciation for the techniques used to understand the customer's why and trust commitment to a new idea is important.
In the effort to gather valued customer insights, design sprints provide tools to accomplish such information discovery. Typically, a design sprint tends to be a 5-day workshop with sprint follow-up. For example, in Jake Knapp's SPRINT how to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days book, he provides the how-to methodology. However, when you don't have the luxury of a 5-days workshop with your stakeholders, a 1-day workshop improv can be utilized with good success. By no means what I'm advocating denigrates Jake Knapp's model of design thinking, his book is on point when your schedule allows for all those methodology permutations. What I'm referring to is a situation where a 1-day workshop and a 4-week sprint with daily standup with stakeholders can apply a systematic approach to identifying key business objectives, attributes that can influence success, and the potential product desired state.
As key business objectives are discovered, a short and/or long-term strategy can be applied to the Return On Investment (ROI) such that "Just Good Enough" based on time and budget is a viable option. All of this is evaluated against the UX discovery metrics: persona, tasks goals, user journey mapping, scenarios, and other pertinent elements. As an added benefit, the design situation explored in a collaborative workshop can lessen the need for formalized written specifications. When implemented, those typical mental blocks are replaced with functional inventive ideation and vertical boundaries are replaced with a collaborative effort.
The following value propositions are the resultant of problem space domain articulation and synthesis take-away at the end of the 4-week sprint.
Insight Validation through Design Thinking
The design thinking workshop brought together individuals with varied background and viewpoints that enabled breakthrough insights and solutions to emerge from the initial design scope. This thinking process was an essential tool that illuminated the desire for using systematic reasoning and intuition to explore ideal state software development within the client process.
Traditionally, the value proposition is a promise of utility, and/or feeling. For example, if you buy a luxury item, there is a perceived promise that you will receive a product that is well-designed for the intended purpose. Therefore, the strategic UX conversation is on the how a business decision or a market positioning can positively influence the user experience while acknowledging the implicit value how a well-designed product contributes to the financial success. In other words, we could say design thinking sensibility and methods delivery is a planned approach to business requirements through a feasible design solution.
Align around the problem with Collaboration
Collaboration provides a group-driven effort to formalize and disseminate a trust in communication practice with success metrics that support the emergent design language. In this specific client case the success metrics were established with these definitions: personas, use case definitions, experience mapping, scenarios, end-to-end user journey map, functional flows, sketching those moments with conceptual wireframes, and prototype demo.
Commitment to a new idea requires organizational collaboration support for something new. This requires attention to how the idea is created, shared, and brought-to-life as to the new idea itself.
What is the Empathy of Human Motivation
Design thinking is the empathetic stance that is fundamental to business success. During the discovery phase, the target persona communication challenges and language ambiguity with provisioning opportunities for innovation. In this particular client case, the end-user reality lens was defined in real-time descriptors of being able to act quickly with a certain level of data discovery due-diligence. This criterion provided a primary focus on human empathy values to establish a fundamental baseline for design evolution.
Therefore, the exploration of the why the customer is doing, what is the problem they have, and what are their expectations.
Optimism-Iterate towards the right experience
The constraints of the problem space provide alternative solution thinking. In turn, the wireframe modeling reflected diverse methods of open-minded to the discovery process which is embedded in design thinking. This was captured in the customer's behavior definition within the system of task completion. Utilizing various methods of investigation provides a deeper understanding and insightful things about the end-user work, it's the UX strategic weapon of disrupting the norm through reframing the problem differently.
Embracing Risk-Is legacy behavior greater than the Anxiety of the new opportunity?
In the end, what are those solutions that present a design that is transformative? In this client example, a leap of faith to empower the end-user with a tool that could visualize data was proof positive for design thinking methodology. The visual capability came in the form of a dashboard where multiple streams of content were consolidated into one view.
This innovative risk provided an unbounded future growth in one tool as well as initiating the seeds of cultural growth between client and design service where making things together is the next step. It was the chance to experiment and succeed, and fail, quickly—and learn.