Wh App Design.is.innovative

INNOVATING DESIGN PRACTICE

Designing for Innovation

Effectively applying design to foster innovation.

User experience's role in helping a company innovate can and should extend beyond user flow diagrams, wireframes, and other design specific deliverables. The following provides entry points for using the design team to facilitate innovation within the business.

Before going over the ways, throughout the product lifecycle, that design and user experience roles can help a company innovate the first thing you should attend to is your growth. Reading articles like this — about practicing new activities—should be read with mindfulness towards your goals. In this way, you can consciously think, as you read, about when and where you can apply what you learn.

Be mindful of what you want to grow. Explicitly keep in mind what skills you could or would like to grow by building design leadership in the product lifecycle.

In the Beginning

When a company or group is embarking on product discovery it helps to have ways to create a shared understanding of the space the product falls into. User Research and Design have many tools to help these endeavors.

With meetings being online, tools like Miro, Lucidchart, Trello, Figma, Jira, and InVision provide collaborative spaces for teams to gather around to work out product strategy.

MIRO — Collaborative diagramming — www.miro.com

Design-led — doesn't mean the activity needs to end in a deliverable from the design team. It means that the design process — empathizing with the user, framing problems, organizing complex concepts into simple patterns, and creative solutions is a tool for innovating. Design roles flex these muscles all of the time and are in a good place to facilitate sessions where the whole team needs to generate understanding and alignment.

Working with the team to create concept maps or use case storyboards, — boundary objects that create shared models of understanding — are activities that provide direction or collapse a problem space into something tractable.

It is useful to come into a collaborative session with artifacts or documents that provide some of the background needed to discuss the problem. The problem doesn't seem so open and it makes it easier to pull out language, concepts, capabilities and activities to diagram.

Be Strategic

With the advent of machine learning and artificial algorithms driving products, many important decisions about the design of the product are inside technologies that can be considered black boxes.

Design can partner with data science to open the boxes and understand how to provide trust and transparency about how systems are acting.

Applied Design

Part of placing a product in the context of its competitors is how it differentiates itself. Design goals, principles, and heuristics provide guide rails for making decisions about what is important about the product, both for the users and the company.

When introducing a new product often the value it brings is the reduction of effort or being easier to use. Interaction Equity is a way of having a conversation about activities and evaluating how much different directions benefit or harm the users' desire to use the product.

Filling the Gaps

As the product lifecycle moves along, design leadership can help guide the product to better results by helping teams fill in gaps of product requirements.

Often feature lists drive product direction. Features do not provide an understanding of the users' needs, goals, or environment — all information needed to correctly design appropriate experiences. Working with the team to find the customer or user requirements that drove the feature list provides opportunities to innovate and better meet users' and customers' needs or desires.

Probing into why a feature is suggested and how it might be surfaced or surfaced differently is a way to lead while providing value.

Features are often preconceived notions about how the user should interact with the system (a table with…, a checklist that lets user…, a dialog with… ).

A way to get away from features and explore other solutions is to concentrate on user stories.

The "As <X> user, I want/need <to do something>, so that I can <reach a goal>" format of user stories can be used from very vague strategic user goals all the way down to the details that drive development.

The Agile process has promoted the use of user stories and many process management products like JIRA implement them into the structure of requests. However, teams often don't fill them out or they fill them out from a feature point of view.

If designers help with the writing of user stories from the beginning of the process, instead of expecting other roles to write them, a designerly focus on the user and experiential outcome can be captured and articulated.

Similarly, understanding when a feature will be used, by how many people, with how many objects helps work out details that can uncover ways to create a better, more enjoyable, or more efficient product.

Frank discussions about the percentage of the user population that will use a feature and how important it will be to their enjoyment or work helps everyone set priorities better.

Once It's Built

Once coding begins design's focus shifts to making sure the results meet the level of quality needed for users to engage and trust the system. If your development team has not done much front-end development now is the time to work out processes to create alignment between the design and product to be released. Before coding starts it helps to educate everyone involved in the expectations for the finished product. This mostly comes down to sharing with them how and why a pixel perfect result matters.

Having examples of good and bad spacing, alignment, interactions, animations and other experiential aspects of systems like yours will help sell your vision. Start collecting them early.

It helps to establish touchpoints for Design to review work in progress. In our projects we ask to see the feature just before it is committed to do a sanity check and then again once everything is together to make sure all the parts integrated properly.

Make sure to have conversations about sanity checks, design reviews, integration reviews early in the development cycle. You want to help catch issues early so they can be resolved with the least effort.

Out the door

When the product is put in front of users we want to make sure that they understand and appreciate the innovations that have been created. To make sure to receive meaningful feedback we do not want to bias users with our knowledge of what it does. We want to gather unbiased feedback so that we know whether customers will adopt and then use the product. User Research is a great way to do this, but if it is not available you can help facilitate customer feedback sessions in ways that provide meaningful and actionable feedback.

Design roles can facilitate innovations at many points along the process of product development. Starting from the moment a group or company thinks they want or need to pursue a new direction through to gathering customer feedback on released products. Understanding when to apply design thinking — both the specific practice as well as designerly processes, will help your company innovate and grow design skills and leadership.