De-scoping with user centric approach
Case Study: Early User Research can help identifying the product direction which is not aligned with the overall goal and save unnecessary cost while developing a product.
Design Strategy or for that matter any strategy at its core is choice of where not to play. It simply delivers focus. It helps the team/organization to concentrate on things which will have the most impact.
How was I involved ? — Contribution
- Created wireframes and translated insights into concepts
- Planned the user research and conducted it along with all 7 team members
- Introduced the team to the method of User Centric/Design Thinking
How did it start? — Initiation
As a part of a regular 1:1 with one of my dotted line senior manager, I mentioned that it would be great to work on a blue-sky project. To my surprise, within seconds he bounced back at me a project brief.
The brief given was…
Create an early concept for a cloud based solution related to Task management specially focused at Professional Services Industry.
How did we navigate through the Project? — Journey
STEP FOLLOWED
- Introduction about Design Thinking to the Team (3 Days introductory session)
- Brain dump of what would Task Management mean for Professional Service industry
- User Research Preparation & User Research
- Story telling & synthesis
- Ideation, Validation & Iterations
- Presentation to Stakeholders
IDEATION & VALIDATION
As a team there were multiple rounds of ideations. In the end we validated w set of wireframes and then finally revised it as a final version. The bellow shows one such screen of the whole concept.
What did we learn? — Lesson Learnt
De-scoping is important as it helps in making the right investments
The project got shelved for sometime after we presented the outcomes to the stakeholders. We were able to save heavy investment in this area as the team realised early enough that the identified user needs were not aligned with the business viability for that moment.
Involve stakeholders early in the process
To make sure project is going in the right direction, right people should be involved at the right time. If we had involved the Product Management guys after synthesis phase, we could have changed the design direction earlier and made the concept more viable from the start.
