In a recent job interview I’ve been asked how I would establish a UX Design strategy in the company I was applying for. After a short thought I roughly explained the steps I’d undertake to get from zero to established UX Design and it sufficed for that moment.
But I knew I could better illustrate the issue at hand and so I kept rethinking and refining my proposed strategy ever since. Writing it all down helped me structure and organize my thoughts and it gave me a better overview over the whole process. I’d like to share these thoughts with you to help you prepare for your next UX Design related job interview.
Let’s assume the company offers an online platform that connects buyers and sellers of some sort. It doesn’t really matter what’s exactly being sold. Things could also be rented. It just doesn’t make much of a difference. We further assume that the platform has already been launched some time ago and there is a significant base of registered users, yet there was no dedicated User Experience Designer involved.
To design and develop a product that people love we need to know our users. So how do we get to know them? We do so by talking to and observing them. But who are we going to talk to if we don’t even know yet who our users are?
First of all we need to start with some assumptions. To find out about who our users might be, we go and talk to everyone involved in the project. This way, interviewing all stakeholders, we try to determine who the people on the team think our users might be. If possible, we try to match this information with some market research to see if there are similar findings. Next we analyze the data of our registered users searching for patterns in their personal information. It’s really a matter of which kind of data there is but we should try to look for some information that allows for categorization of users. At the end of the day we should have a rough idea (read: good assumptions) about which types of users our service should be designed for.
Ok, next step: questionnaires. To determine whether our assumptions about the different user archetypes are true we interview real users and try to gather as much information as possible. First we contact our registered users and invite those that seem to fit into our expected user archetypes. We especially seek to understand their goals and motivations, what drives them,