Designing a light weight UX process for small teams

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Designing User Experience (UX) is a crucial step in the new product development process.  The process shall help the product develop a personality and deliver the value proposition. UX design process needs substantial investment from development team and business users. Small teams may not have the time and resources to go through the full process of User Research, Modeling, Requirements Definition, Design Framework, Detailed Dev Sprints and Ensure Success (Metrics). 

The following points shall help us keep the process on target. 

1. Always have a mother ship - Latching on to a well established UXD horizontal in internal/external organisation will take burden off the team. By doing so you automatically subscribe to it's principles, policy, patterns, design guides, standards and tooling. 

2. Pick the top 3-4 principles - Don't try to boil the ocean. Understand the top 3-4 important principles and their order of priority. 

3. Reduce tooling overhead - You don't need to use highly sophisticated prototyping and mockup tool to make it work. Paper, pencil and ruler can do wonders. 

4. Drive business ownership  - Most important part is to keep the business involved and engaged through out process. At the end of funnel, core team shall feel emotionally invested in the product and out come. Use Design Thinking methodology to identify and solve the core business problem. 

5. Stick to UI basics - Get the fundamentals of UI design right. 

6. Don't try to please everyone - My favourite. Trying to please everyone, pleases no one. 

  • Alignment – Be purposeful not ambiguous  & visually connect elements 
  • Proximity – Group relevant times 
  • Consistency & repetition – Show relationships. Signify special elements. All headings/subheadings related items should have same style (color, font, weight) 
  • Contrast – elements should be contrasted for better readability and content arrangement. Use color shape, size, position & orientation  
  • Color – Be purposeful not ambiguous. Use JDA colors for content. Use gray shades for contrast, labels.  
  • Typography – Open Sans, Skopex Gothic. Use all caps sparingly. Use size > 10 
  • Visibility – Be wary of fold of the webpage (resolution changes fold), scrolling. Don’t make your content look like an Ad or banner, people will ignore it.  
  • Understandability –  Users don't need a help guide to understand the product
  • Simplicity – make things easier  
  • “Space is like AIR, let your design breath”  

 

In my experience, I got an opportunity to drive a sales engagement platform end to end with a team of 3 web developers.  

  • Our Mothership - Internal UX Team & Salesforce UX Team for principles https://medium.com/salesforce-ux/building-an-enterprise-framework-is-hard-1e8d8b33e082#.8yvulggjm for more details.
  • Principles
    • Clarity - Users shouldn't require a help guide/video to use the product
    • Efficiency - Less number of clicks/effort from user
    • Consistency  - All form factors should look and feel the same. 
    • Beauty - It's should look good. 
  • Process 
    • Proto-Persona - Don't get bogged down by interviews and user research to define Personas. Describe target users based on stakeholder assumptions. 
    • MindMap - Conduct 2-3 focussed design thinking sessions and MindMap the findings all the way. 
    • Sketch - Pencil and Paper worked for us.  
    • Iterate - until business sees value 


Image credit IDEO http://bit.ly/2a9RrNK​

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