DISCOVER
A good process allows time for discovery, innovation, and creativity. Combining this with user research, competitive analysis, and collaboration between UX, product and developers validates the "Why?" and "What problem are we trying to solve?" early in the process.
DEFINE
The first step in the design process is to identify the problem we are trying to solve. Why do we need this product or service at this time, in this way, with this audience, and on these platforms? A lean canvas can quickly identify the users, unique value proposition, channels, competition, ROI, KPIs, etc.
PRIORITIZATION
Prioritizing product features is critical for success. Using a faceted feature analysis is an objective way to identify three characterizing facets in any project. Each business unit owns its own domain. UX rates user value, product rates business value, development rates ease of implementation, the risk of launching (or not launching) the feature, and the operational impact. It's imperative to identify and agree on how to measure success.
DESIGN & RESEARCH
Sketching sessions or Design Sprints are my favorite way to begin design. This leverages the team's expertise and creates an atmosphere for early stakeholder buy-in. Prototyping allows for continued collaboration with the teams. Conducting user research early and often informs the iterative designs to meet user needs and business goals. A UX heuristics analysis can be used for evaluation as well as during the design process. Assessing and iterating the information architecture drives understanding of how to design for clarity.
DEVELOPMENT & QA
The earlier the collaboration with developers, the better. Providing clarity to the QA team benefits the project efficiency. User stories that outline the acceptance criteria, requirements, and measurements for success greatly help QA to be more efficient and effective.
MEASURE & PIVOT
Measurement is an ongoing process and often requires some sort of pivot. Qualitative and Quantitative data play an important role at this stage and throughout.
eHarmony UX Process
I developed this process map to establish a way for teams to visualize collaboration at different stages and understand how we can leverage the expertise of each team member. This helped clarify who was doing what for each phase and streamlined our process.
eHarmony User Journey
Embarking on a user journey takes investment. I illustrated this concept to help stakeholders understand how this could inform us about how users currently interact with our site. The stakeholder buy-in allowed us to begin collecting the qualitative and quantitative data to plot the user touch points.
User Flow Workshop
This is the messy, creative work behind the onboarding user flow workshop. We explored flow variations and prioritization for profile, match preferences, and the compatibility questionnaire.
eHarmony High-fidelity User Flow
This user flow example displays the strategic thinking for onboarding new users through the relationship questionnaire, conversion, and communication between matches. Surprisingly, the interstitials did not increase drop-off and helped underscore the importance of long-term relationship success.
Information Architecture
Information architecture is the core of user experience. It makes the complex clear by providing a clear and organized structure of the data and information presented to users.
These are IA examples that help make complex information clear. It's important for users to experience a learnable environment whether in iOS, Android, mobile web and/or desktop, especially for a multi-device world.
eHarmony IA Cross-Platform Parity
A holistic vision and understanding can help to create a peaceful simplicity. I designed IA for iOS, Android, mobile web and desktop to highlight the disparity between platforms, to help bring harmony to the taxonomy and to transform the empty forward user paths by identifying meaningful transitions.
eHarmony RQ (Relationship Questionnaire) A/B Test
With the goal of reducing user fatigue when completing the relationship questionnaire, I led the effort to explore ideas for sequence reorganization, question removal and photo upload prioritization. This structure helped to reimagine the sections of match preferences, profile and compatibility.
RESEARCH
My training in user research was thorough and challenged me to continually strive for ethically unbiased user tests. It's important for product and UX teams to agree on the research objectives, to have a clear methodology and to verify that every single question provides an answer that will inform the design.
I have extensive experience with moderated and unmoderated research techniques to define customer needs and use cases, design real personas, creating storyboards, deep-dive into task analysis, and improve user flows.
First Time Buyer Research
We realized through our customer conversion data that we were having a problem retaining first-time buyers. The design team held a design sprint, produced a prototype, conducted user research and learned a lot. All participants wanted more information about the seller. We learned that the number of sales and a seller rating scale would tremendously increase trust and sell-through rates. The problem was that stakeholders wanted us to develop trust through Tradesy as a peer-to-peer marketplace but users told us they wanted more visibility into individual sellers.
Onboarding Experiment
Our challenge was to reimagine an engaging experience that helps buyers find relevant and enticing products. We created an onboarding experience to lead users to the right products from reputable sellers and encourages them to return again and again. We learned from our prototype that buyers don’t mind giving detailed preference information to get better recommendations. We also experimented with global preferences versus session-specific preferences.
Competitive Analysis - Mitsubishi
This is a competitive analysis I gathered for a Saatchi & Saatchi project. We identified competitive usability to inspire creative differentiation.
Heuristics
Heuristics are sometimes deemed 'old school' yet they are critical for establishing principles within our discipline. There are agile ways to establish this credibility within design rationale.
IA Heuristics Checklist – Redesigned
Abby Covert, an IA expert and author of “How to Make Sense of Any Mess” created a poster that references five important historical sources of information architecture and usability heuristics to provide a list of ten core heuristic principles. Each principle is paired with a checklist of thought-starter questions designed to facilitate better critiques.
I struggled to get my teams to use the poster so I converted it (with Abby’s permission) to a Figma file so that designers could use it as a checklist while they are designing. The file is available upon request.
Personas
The best personas I've designed have come from data. Begin with qualitative data and follow that up by combining both quantitative data to show cluster segmentation and qualitative research to understand perceptions, attitudes, and motivations. Typically I get as much data as I can in addition to qualitative research like analytics, demographics, social media behavior, competitive analysis, etc. Personas are a great way to model and communicate for whom we are designing.
Tradesy Seller Persona
This is an early example of a Seller persona representing a small data set of qualitative research. It’s a good start, but I pivoted our approach to a more robust data-driven initiative. We worked closely with the BI team to create a cluster-based segmentation analysis to allow us to identify associated traits and common behaviors for LTV users. After extrapolating the user patterns, we evaluated this data against additional qualitative research to help us learn perceptions, attitudes, concerns, and user motivations.