Approach

Concepting

Business Strategy Investigation

Obtain a deep understanding of the business objectives, landscape and opportunity.

Start with investigating the company and their business model.  Understand the business model, competitive advantage, current performance, analytics and employees goals. Deep dives into marketing and operations performance and processes are also beneficial.

Gain a deep understanding of the brand.  What is the value proposition?  Who is the design target? How is the brand expressed in both visual identity and tone?

Develop a strong understanding of industry dynamics and trends. Determine actionable opportunities for innovation and sustainable competitive differentiation. Understand what trends are disrupting the industry are what is driving change.

Identify current best practices and become familiar with serviceable substitutes, in absence of the optimal solution. What people, processes and technology can be leveraged as experience principles?

Understand what content is needed.  What characterizes the content in this experience?  What is currently blocking content from being as effective as it needs to be?

Investigate the technology and ensure actionable design.  What is the right architecture? What technical limitations should be considered in designing the best experience?

Review both direct competitors and other beacon experiences. What is happening in the overall digital landscape? What can be learned from competitors, as well as other popular, common and successful experiences?

The goal is to have a high level understanding of the opportunity and agreement on competitive landscape and point of departure. All else will inform questions to be answered in research.

Rapid Research & Insights

The best design is grounded in a deep understanding of users and sparked by research-generated insights. 

Ensure a thorough grounding in market segmentation and key targets. From there, determine how to identify them and uncover their mindset. What do users need?  What are their key characteristics, motivations and goals?  What are their current and anticipated frustrations and pain points?

Conducting rapid research is simple after establishing optimal methods for reaching the target. Best results come from working with fast online recruiting start-ups and utilizing intercept methods to get in front of the target from the very beginning.  Other forms of recruiting can also prove effective, but these two approaches will typically decrease the cost of research and the time it takes to conduct it.  

Additionally, wherever possible, contextual inquiry and ethnography inform a clear understanding of what people actually do, as opposed to relying on their memory. 

Design Thinking Workshops

Design thinking methods and workshops unlock the creativity within us all.  Bringing cross-functional team members together injects the ideation process with fresh perspectives and helps lift team members outside their everyday constraints. Moreover these activities can foster buy-in and build excitement across stakeholders.  

Choosing the right methods is part experience and part exploration.  Basic methods like card storming, affinity mapping and design studios are excellent for rapid prototyping.  Additional methods like user journey sketching, body storming, sensory ignition, goal exaggeration, collage and improv are particularly effective methods for infusing even more creativity into prototypes across any medium, whether paper, digital or physical spaces.  

The ultimate goal of design thinking and workshops should be to create a shared and viable experience hypothesis.

Prototyping & User Testing

Prototyping can be done in various shades of fidelity, from paper prototypes to actual working code.  Thorough validation of the experience is critical to cementing the experience strategy. Development of medium fidelity prototypes (comps or high fidelity wireframes in Invision) ensures maximum user input in the most efficient way.  While paper prototyping has its place, higher fidelity artifacts are able to better represent subtleties in interfaces.  

The choice between remote and in-person testing procedures and moderated and unmoderated testing will often be guided by timing, budget, geography and quantity of personas to be tested.

Wherever possible the team should observe testing.  Designers gain substantial insight when they see their work in action, and they are more comfortable lending their voice to the process when they have firsthand knowledge of users. It's highly desirable to test multiple options, wherever possible, as doing so generates valuable dialogue with the test subjects. It also helps prevent the design team from becoming too attached to just one idea. 

Once validated, the final approach for an experience can be set.  The team can then proceed confidently into the iteration cycle for launch. 

Building

Continued Prototype Development

Ongoing Testing & Validation

The preferred approach leads with a low fidelity version of the entire experience, before refining the pieces. Starting with sketching and going into high fidelity wireframes or loose comps helps developers visualize the experience and contribute. Using the same tool across all phases of design increases speed and efficiency, and enables designers to seamlessly iterate on the same files. Tools like InVision Inspect can help eliminate ambiguity for developers.