Business-Centric UX Design
So you want to do UX design, and then start with learning Figma, some After effects, add some card sorting for information architecture, protocols for research sounds like fun, Wireframing+Design thinking, Visual Styling, and then you are all set!
Is it that simple? Why do products fail then after so much hard work being put behind applying the process and all these great abilities to build beautiful screens?
Is there something UX designers are missing out on? Well…it might be the depth of their understanding of business and value proposition.
Before requirements are crafted and then land at your desk for you to start building screens and flows around, a lot of groundwork has gone into place. A score of people from across the business, product, marketing, finance, etc got together and came up with what they thought would be successful as an Idea and now they want you to make it. The challenge is that they may have already set you up for failure!
If you want to save yourself from building the wrong thing it's time for you to go deep diving into business. What should you understand about business? well…
Business domain is not just about understanding business terms & concepts. It has to do with getting a sense of the nature of business and how it works in a particular domain. This can tell you a great deal about where you can add value. If the nature of business is very dependent upon how customers perceive it, then you could help in transforming the upfront surfaces like public website, marketing collateral, onboarding journeys. In another case it might be that business primarily runs on client relationships then you could help with enabling their sales team better or improving the product funnel points such that they can show better performance numbers.
The business context will take you deep into how the company was built, the legacy, where have they reached, what market & competitive challenges are they facing. How have they built their solutions is also key to give you a sense of what technology challenges may be coming your way.
The model is about how do they make money. It is a percentage on each transaction, is it Ad revenue, is it commission or is the model still being realized. This helps you to design your product experience around the various facets of how the model works.
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Strategic abilities & advantages help with understanding what can be leveraged to further the success of the product. It might be a strong brand, tech stack, specific product capability, or suite of other products that you could build on top of. This is key for you to understand why they are likely to win in the venture they are undertaking.
Landscape momentum is complex and crucial. It is about looking at multiple moving parts, like icebergs that are floating with their own momentum that may collide in various ways. What are all the type of target customers within the landscape, how are these customer changing over time, what propositions are competitors bringing into the landscape over time to go after these, how is the company bringing their own value over time to own more of the market, what would disrupt the market, what other forces are at play? This is imperative to understand as the product experience you build will be launched into a state of flux. Remember the world doesn't stand still for you to launch your product proposition and it is always about hitting the ground running!
Target audience is a no-brainer but then what about the target audience should you understand. Not the typical demographic data which then has barely any relation to what you end up designing. Focus on the user’s objectives in context to your product. Also the key behaviors you expect around how they would use the product in context. We design for behaviors, not for demographics.
Vision & Business objectives are about how do they imagine the product to work in the future and what business objectives would they meet. Its imagination from the business point of view if all goes well and they are celebrating their success and year down the line. Then it is just about how you make this all together ‘no so hard’ vision happen.
Why Now? Important to get a sense of what are they trying to achieve in the current context? Do they have to launch something before the competitor does or their sales team is struggling without a clear brand they can market? Is it something that should get launched during the pandemic time as it is a dire need? What are they trying to achieve and why?
Product value is about clarity on what exactly provides the strongest customer motivation. It is not about a laundry list of features but explaining in one single sentence what is so great about the product that customers will be driven to signup and start using it immediately.
Brand expectations are beyond color palette, images, and fonts. It is about how do they want their customers to feel when interacting with their service. Then interaction experience, communication tonality, and visual styling are derivatives of the same.
Competitive context is not about looking at the UI of competitors and seeing what we could learn from that. It is a bit like investigating what is going on behind the scenes. What are they building now and in the future? How could they stand to win? How would you have to position yourself to win?
Key desired behaviors that they would like their customers to start doing such that in correlation their business objectives will start looking real. Key means 4–5 and not a wishlist of 80. The more clear and focussed we are about this, the better the product design structure and flows are going to work overall.
Known challenges, Customer feedback & Product Data are a must-have. Dig through what they have on this. Rummage through strategy decks, previous projects, etc to build a robust understanding of this.
As a designer in today’s context, we are constantly looking to upskill to then build products of higher visual, emotive, and business value. And online content is teaming with courses, articles, and sermons on what you should learn. Coming from my experience in the design education field as well as being a design practitioner/leader, when it comes to UX you have to start becoming business-centric to give direction & shape to your creative talents. Try to look at the business from the lens that I have shared above from across my career of building for wide range of businesses and see if it gives you a whole new context on how you could design & build successful products.
