Design & Delivery frameworks, methodologies, and tools
Design & Delivery frameworks, methodologies, and tools
Build products and services people love!
Designing and delivering digital products that people love can be a challenge, particularly where customers are now demanding better user experiences, faster.
Digital design and delivery now revolve around three key concepts:
Identification of pain-points
Products are created to solve problems, and user experience is about how we solve pain points effectively. Solving a user’s pain points involves empathising and really understanding the problem, which in itself is a process of empathising, researching and observing to discover insights, and ideating concepts before landing on a hypothesis to experiment on.
Creation of Minimum Viable Products (MVP)
When the problem is understood, user experience is about how you solve the problem. Solving the problem with the dimensions of market and product complexities while balancing the intricate triangle of time, cost, and scope tradeoffs. One of the best ways to do this is to create MVPs, creating a basic version of a product and it’s features that can be used to test with real customers and get valuable feedback.
With digital products it is now easier than ever to build MVPs compared to physical products that could drain time and money. User interfaces form a substantial part of the user experience for digital products, and a benefit of building MVPs for software user interfaces is that parts of it can be easily built and adapted in response to feedback gained through iteration, whether it’s through paper prototypes or digital mockups. Wireframing tools like LucidChart, Miro, and Invision make it easy to create powerful mockups to evaluate the potential success of a digital product design.
Growth & Scale
Growing and scaling a digital product involves multiple iterations of MVPs for new and existing features, but product features are driven by product strategy. Very much like the iterative approach for developing a product, defining the product strategy to target customers, new growth channels, and enhance the product is often done iteratively as well through testing of assumptions, and forming hypotheses to be validated. After all, a strategy that is set in stone and doesn’t adapt may fail.
As more organisations go digital and focus on delivering digital products, some may find it difficult to apply the three concepts we discussed that are critical to digital design and delivery. There are thankfully many frameworks that help organisations translate these concepts into actionable approaches for design and delivery. While there is no single tool and framework that can be used to deliver digital products people love, we discuss some popular ones in this paper, starting with design-focused frameworks to those that focus more on delivery.
Design thinking
Design thinking is solving problems with a human-centred approach. Design thinking methodologies can come in a few flavours, but generally follow ‘Discovery’ and ‘Design’ phases which can be further broken down to an iterative cycle of ‘Understand, Observe, Point of View, Ideate, Prototype, and Test’.
Discover
The first step to any problem-solving approach or methodology is about understanding and collecting information to form hypotheses that can later be tested with real customers through observation and customer interactions. This can start out by collecting data, performing observations and talking to customers to validate assumptions so you can form a point of view of the customer (ie. a persona) that can be the representation of the ideal customer that has the need your products are targeting. This is the discovery phase, which forms the basis for the design of your product.
Design
The design phase of the design thinking methodology focuses on creating solutions that add value to the user based on the information identified in the discovery phase. This usually takes place as an iteration of ideation to identify solutions that address needs, prototyping to create an interactive Minimum Viable Product to interact with customers fitting personas defined earlier, before testing the prototypes to receive feedback and validate hypotheses.
Customer Journey map
Customer journey maps are visual storylines of a customer or persona’s interaction with a service, brand, or product. It lays out all the touchpoints for how a customer interacts with your digital product but can extend even further to how they interact with your brand itself.
The customer journey map often focuses on a customer’s persona which was introduced in the design thinking methodology and extends the use of the persona’s ability to help the organisation step into the customer’s shoes to develop a map of customer interactions. Through observation and data collected, an organisation developing digital products can map each touchpoint to collect feedback and identify needs.
The benefit of journey maps lies in identifying and understanding potential pain points throughout the customer lifecycle and can answer the questions of:
User interface expectations;
Brand interactions before a customer gets to the purchase;
How the customer can get their issues addressed in a timely manner.
Lean UX
Lean user experience isn’t just about executing design elements, but more about why it exists, what’s required to implement it, and most importantly - whether it meets business objectives.
User experience has long been about the perception of a system more than meeting objectives, such as the effectiveness of the interface and the ease of use. While agile has many benefits in that iteration often leads to a superior product, it can also introduce a lot more complexity churning through multiple designs which don’t work well with delivering incremental variables. Lean UX attempts to reconcile the challenges with the standard agile methodology for designing user experiences, by creating a process that involves:
Benefit Hypothesis
A common approach to solving problems is to identify solutions upfront, but benefit hypotheses assume that the proposed features and expected results (and sometimes even the problem) are assumed that it may not be right until it has been tested and proven.
Collaborative design
Definition of done used to be defined and measured by how well the product complied with an initial design, which was usually created by subject matter experts that knew the most about a product. Collaborative design is about de-centralising decision making when developing the product to empower agile teams to collaborate on user experience and design, which are so important for digital products.
Build the Minimum Viable/Marketable feature
Minimum viable/marketable features consist of the smallest functionality that can be used to validate that the feature is beneficial. They may not need to be working prototypes, and could even be paper or low fidelity prototypes, depending on the feature.
Spotify MVP
The idea of prototypes and Minimum Viable/Marketable features often in this paper within other frameworks, and that’s largely due to its value in creating something that can be interacted with very quickly for feedback. Big bang delivery was once the common way of delivering software, but the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) has emerged as a popular option for delivering value quicker and incremental solutions that quickly address needs, compared to a product built over a long period of time that may not have achieved all their needs.
Henrik Knibeg framed up Spotify’s MVP approach which focused on creating the earliest testable/usable/lovable product. The idea is simple - let’s say a business was building a product that could help them cook their food quickly. We could have set out to build a microwave to heat up that TV dinner in minutes and deliver the microwave in pieces or start by building a fire so our clients don’t starve and gradually learn and build on it. Fire is the smallest thing you can get to customers to learn from real feedback rather than a hypothetical one, and much like your products, it’s beneficial to get feedback from your customers working with a fully MVP version of the product rather than see parts of it.
Scrum
Just as there are many flavours of Design Thinking methodology, there are many flavours of Agile delivery methods. Scrum is a delivery framework that is often used by modern software development teams, using the concept of sprints to deliver value quickly. A sprint is a defined cycle for answering business ideas and delivering prototypes that are ideal for quickly delivering digital functionality. At its core, sprints consist of planning, execution, review, and retrospectives.
Planning
Sprint planning is a collaborative session where teams plan out the work that will be completed in the sprint and how the chosen work will get done and is usually a collaborative effort between the product owner, scrum master, and development team.
Execution and review
As the sprint gets underway, regular standups provide a view of how the work is progressing. The goal of the meeting is to surface any blockers and challenges that would impact the ability to deliver on the sprint’s planned items. Once the sprint has been completed, a sprint review is an opportunity for the team to demonstrate the completed work before it is deployed to production.
Retrospective
A core principle of Agile revolves around continuous learning, and Scrum rounds out sprint delivery with retrospectives that identifies areas of improvement and learnings that can be applied for sprints going forward.
I discussed some popular design and delivery methodologies, frameworks, and tools but these are only a handful of many that help organisations apply the key concepts of digital design and delivery that were discussed in this paper. These frameworks may also not necessarily be prescriptive and are certainly intended to be adapted to an organisation’s particular way of working and the digital product being created.
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THATS THE BLOG.
References:
https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/product-management/which-tools-do-product-managers-use