Starting out right and doing your research!

If you are building a new service from scratch or redesigning an existing one, the first thing you have to ask yourself is WHY. Why are we doing this? What effects do we expect to achieve by the design change? The effects are often created by one or more user groups who are supposed to do something in the service. Buying, learning, interacting etc. Therefore we also need to know what’s in it for the users. What motivates them to engage with your service. WHO are we actually designing for? And WHAT do they need to do? What are the behaviors we need to support? What are the user stories that we need to enable? And… last but not least… HOW could we support that within our design and decided features. I have been doing this over the last decade and a half for clients. And the methods and tools I keep returning to are:

• User research: Surveys and interviews
• Target group analysis: Identifying the primary target group – their behaviour, needs and goals. Along with obstacles and opportunities.
• Identifying the mastery path: Discovery, Onboarding, Habit-building and Mastery
• Impact mapping: Creating Impact maps for Business goals where the user goals align
• Customer Journey mapping: Step by step through the user experience and mapping out touch point and pain points.
• Card sorting / Affinity mapping: Sorting things out and clustering them in themes
• Impact effort mapping: Prioritizing features and functionality

Preferably I walk in collaborative settings together with the client and doing workshops to generate insights and results.