Your daily dose of UX design nuggets

A UX designer’s biggest challenge is to identify and solve existing problems with a product design and make users happier than they were earlier. Getting to the root of the users perturbation is not easy. Sometimes, the user is not able to express it themselves. Sometimes, the user has just accepted a particular way of working and gone ahead. Sometimes they just feel the tension, but don't know what it is that is making them tense. Delving into usage patterns and finding issues that can be fixed is a full time activity and requires concerted collaboration between the user, the designer and, sometimes the product manager.

Some people think that UX design is not that essential for a B2B product, as it is for a B2C. My own experience suggests that user experience is even more important for a B2B product, mainly due to the complexity inherent in B2B products, as well as the the criticality of some operations.

The process of design thinking consists of five steps that UX designers need to follow in order to discover problems, their root causes, and find meaningful solutions to a problem. Not all problems are equivalent. However, the aim of the designer should be to bring 10x usability gains through their changes. The product manager has to be involved in some of these steps.

The design thinking steps go like this:

• Empathize: Understanding the users problems or motivations, work style, pressure areas, pains they face through conducting user interviews and watching them closely at work, creating empathy maps, listening and delving further. This should be done along with the product manager

• Define: The product manager and designer analyze the research information together and produce a concise problem statement and possible solution or hypothesis. 

• Ideate: Designers think of all possible solutions or optimizations and evaluate each one. The get the product manager to evaluate as well. Thats because, some of the ideas may not be feasible, other could be feasible, but may require inordinate efforts, not commensurate with the returns.

• Prototype: After sifting and brainstorming through the ideas, you pick a couple of favored ideas and turn them into a flow representation of the feature that will solve the user’s pain point, adding greater detail and complexity with iterations

• Test: Rapid testing of prototypes is a critical component of the design process. Prototypes should be released every week or even twice a week. Put the prototype in the hands of the user and determine whether the design has solved the problem at hand or has reduced the tension or frustration. This is much simpler than A/B testing and often serves the purpose adequately, and with much less effort. 

Design thinking requires keeping the user in mind at all times during the UX design process. It does not matter if it is a B2B product or a B2C product.