Corus Entertainment, Cynch
With Corus’ new initiative in a platform that allows advertisers to buy audiences in their line of specialty channels, I was hired to deliver designs that provide best experiences for their users.
I have observed that the requirements to deliver the designs, did not communicate to the team a precise desired outcome in the initiative. This made it difficult to establish the right approach to design.
How might I orient the team to design for achieving outcomes over outputs? Below are the means by which I achieved this way of designing.
Drive vision with outcomes.
Typically, in most places, design is often utilized as a conveyor belt for features business wants to rollout in a given year, by means of requests and requirements for deliverables. Consequently, in this manner, strategy and context is often lost in translation or not considered at all. Therefore, much waste is produced over a design that has no target or outcome in mind. To overcome this, I had to orient the team towards an aligned, and shared understanding of the vision and outcomes of their initiatives.
Understanding the problem we are trying to solve.
How can you produce a good solution if you do not have an understanding of the problem? To produce good solutions, having a problem statement provides the team with a good point of departure to have a clear focus on the work ahead. It also provides scope to keep us grounded. For this, I sent out a survey to the team to complete, which revolved around declaring their assumptions in the business outcomes, who the users are, the outcomes users wants to achieve, and the features they think would help achieve the outcomes.
Affinity map the results to construct a first draft of the problem statement.
Once I have acquired the results, I partnered with the Product Owner to cluster the responses to common themes, identifying where multiple stakeholders are aligned or not, and which items needed to be placed in the parking lot. This allowed us to start forming a problem statement based on the clusters we identified.
Outcomes for driving vision.
Aligned and clear idea of what we are trying to solve.
Problem space is scoped to manage our focus.
Contradicting ideas are identified.
Knowledge of the product’s foundation is acquired much more quickly.
All assumptions are declared for better detection of risks.
Who do we assume will use our product and why.
As a Lean UX practitioner, it is my duty to reduce risks that are involved with placing our company initiatives in front of users. Because assumptions about users carry with it risks, it is important to be aligned and know up front what we assume to be “the Users”, so as to test and experiment our ideas early in the product design process through an iterative approach.
Proto persona workshop.
To generate Proto Personas, I facilitated a workshop to determine our assumptions about the users. This helped us to have a focused and shared understanding of our best collective guesses about who will use the product and why.
Work together to collectively identify what our first assumptions are of the users.
Outcomes for Proto Persona workshop
Generalization of who the users are is eliminated.
Expectations are narrowed regarding who to target in the designs.
Shared understanding of assumptions about users.
An idea of who we can test our assumptions on when recruiting for participants.
Incremental approach to moving from assumption to certainty about who we understand to be the users.
Team participation overcame silos.
Paves the way to user centered approaches to planning, decision-making, and design.
Outcomes over outputs.
To produce great outputs in design, a clear understanding of desired outcomes is necessary. Now that the team has a better understanding of outcomes we think users want to achieve, it is crucial to understand the business outcomes we wish to achieve in them. Knowing the outcomes puts the team in a position to ideate on a proper feature that we can validate or prioritize for optimization.
Connecting the outcomes with features.
With a problem statement, and user outcomes now identified, I conducted a features hypothesis workshop to determine with the team the business outcomes and the features we wish to achieve them in. For every feature, we determined the user and what they want to achieve, along with the business outcome we wish to measure to determine success.
Outcomes for Features Hypothesis workshop
Features are now measurable for success.
Features are accountable based on targeted user.
Features now have documented criteria for evaluation in terms of outcomes.
Outcomes now serve as the foundation for ideas in creating outputs (features)
Features are now formatted as experiments to evaluate whether we should continue to invest in them or not.
Goal directed design.
Now that we have determined together the outcomes we are targeting, I can now use them as guides to determine a course of action for the designs. In these outcomes lie the underlying foundation for which the designs will be placed under scrutiny. As such, every design activity and decision will be rooted in goals (outcomes). This we call goal directed design.
Proto persona in action.
We used a sample of the Persona(s) to evaluate and curate designs. Notice Hannah's need to gain buy-in from her stakeholders in advertising. As a result, I designed a summary feature of her reports, to highlight values of campaigns that go through the advertising platform.
Usability testing
In addition to the targeting of outcomes, to mitigate risks in frustrating users by how much effort they have to make to use the platform, I conducted usability tests to evaluate user performances based on tasks. This in turn allowed me to give a report to the team if there are any severe issues that need correcting, and to prioritize a course of action as a result.
Designs were tested through a series of scenarios and subsequent tasks to measure findability, usage, and discoverability. In facilitating tests, I encourage stakeholders to participate as observers.
Usability testing outcomes
Identified problems in the design of the platform.
Uncovered opportunities to improve.
Learned about the participant’s behavior and preferences
Team has visibility of the value of testing to validate ideas.
Reduced risks in frustrating users.