Define
Make sense of your data, synthesise insights and find common patterns. Converge thinking to reframe the definition of the problem, focusing on the user and their journey.
Synthesising insights
Having gathered a breadth of insight from the Discover phase activities, the Define phase involves making sense of the data, synthesising the information and finding common patterns. Your goal now is to reframe the problem and challenge hypotheses, by turning data in actionable insights.
Affinity mapping
Affinity mapping is the process of breaking research data into digestible chunks, adding to post-it notes and tagged with the participants name, before placing on the wall. You can then look for correlations and patterns, re-arranging notes from all participants into themes. Each theme is then labelled and captured to highlight high-level research insights. Themes will include insights about behaviours, pain points, needs, goals and jobs-to-be-done. Differences within each theme will define user segments and allow the creation of user archetypes or personas.
Personas
Personas are a reliable and realistic representation of key user segments. They represent a synthesis of user research in an actionable format. Personas help enable informed and objective design decisions and offer a reference point to prioritise and test features. Importantly, they also act as an engaging artefact for stakeholders to bring the archetype user to life, ensuring the team keeps the user front of mind when making decisions.
Each statement on the persona should have a potential design implication, providing the 'what' and 'why', with relevant context. Whilst contextual information is helpful to bring the archetype user to life, it is important not to focus the persona around demographic information.
Each persona should express and prioritise jobs-to-be-done, behaviours, pain points, goals and needs. They should represent one key user segment, with each segment defined by differing needs and jobs-to-be-done.
User journey mapping
User journey mapping is a method of visualising the journey of an archetype user moving through a product or service, towards achieving a goal or satisfying a need. It allows for an abstraction away from the product / service, to illuminate the holistic experience of a particular persona. Look at what that user is doing before, during and after use. The map typically tracks tasks, touch-points, thoughts and emotions, pain points and needs, over an end-to-end journey.
The goal of a user journey map is to demonstrate the highs and lows that the user encounters whilst on the path to achieving their goal with a product / service. As a result, it highlights opportunities for improvements or enhancements of key moments in the experience. The outcome is a definition of solutions to deliver a more compelling and valuable overall experience. Its also acts as a useful aid in creating a shared frame of reference and understanding across teams.
The journey map is derived from synthesised user research and testing insights. It is important that it is based on an accurate narrative, in order to tell a robust story and enable validated decision making. The process of creating the map should be a collaborative process, with the activity itself being an important value driver in delivering shared understanding and alignment across teams.
The starting point is to define a series of high level phases, centred on a task analysis, then fleshed out through team brainstorming. Once complete, the team can move into ideation of solutions to improve the experience. The user journey map should be digitised, circulated and shared with a wider audience to ensure customer experience is always at the front of mind.
MVP definition
Minimum viable product is a term derived from Lean Startup methodology. It is also a concept used as part of the Lean UX approach to product development. Defined as a product with just enough features to satisfy early customer needs, and to collect feedback for future product development. This approach to gathering insights saves time and cost, versus developing a feature rich product of higher quality that fails due to incorrect assumptions.
Job stories
Job stories is a methodology pioneered by Intercom. It is a reaction to the perceived downfalls inherent with more traditional user stories when used to define product features. In the case of user stories, implementation is coupled with motivations and outcomes, and ignores the context, situation and anxieties of the user. When a feature, defined by a user story fails, it can be difficult to determine whether implementation or assumptions about motivations were incorrect. Job stories are statements that contain a situation, motivation and expected outcome, accounting for the causality as a means of defining features.
Feature prioritisation
Job stories can be defined along the user journey map. From these job stories, solutions and features are ideated, addressing each of the user outcomes. This can be run as a team brainstorming session, the result of which will be many possible feature ideas. It is important to prioritise these ideas to guide the parameters for a first release. Prioritise by scoring each feature on value added and development effort. Draw a line to define your MVP.
User flows
With a set of features decided and a journey through the product defined, a series of key use case scenarios can be created. These will form the basis of key flows a user will take through the product, and inform the interface design with which the user will interact. From each scenario, a user flow diagram is developed. They are a visualisation of the user task flow through the system, informing what the user will be doing before and after visiting an interface, or interacting with a feature within the product.
User flows can be nonlinear and branch out based on decision points in the journey. These alternative flows can provide opportunities for optimisation of the experience. It is useful to start with the 'happy path' - the default scenario that sees the user moving through the system in the most linear way.
Information architecture
Information architecture (IA) is the practice of arranging information to make it understandable. It can be employed to define site structure, categorisation, labelling, navigation and search. And centres on how we make sense of the information contained within a product.
The key output of IA activities is a sitemap. A chart that defines the structure of information within your product. The most common forms depict content hierarchy and the relationship between pages, usually defining your product navigation. The navigation typically consists of links or icons, and is relied upon by users to find content and access features. Helping a user navigate your product should be a high priority.
Sitemaps are informed by, Card Sorting, a research method which allows us to understand how users relate different content. This involves breaking out all content to be included in the product, onto written cards, then observing and recording how users arrange and connect the content into coherent groups. A card sort can be run 'open' or 'closed'. An open sort requires participants to organise cards into their own groups and assign their own labels. A closed sort will provide participants with predefined categories to work within.
Once a sitemap and user flows have been completed, each should be tested with users through scenarios. This will reveal inconsistencies and areas that prove difficult to understand.