How user experience and product development is coming together !

As role of product management in organizations has grown, the interplay of user experience process and product development life cycle have come into focus. To understand their inter-dependencies, it is important to understand the focus of user experience process in the context of product development. At the very basic user experience process focus on understanding user needs, the landscape in which the product will operate and to create a product that will not just address those needs but is also useful, easy to use and delight users.

Moving beyond the visual props and usability stunts

Earlier ux and design process did not have a constant window to engage with the product development life cycle. UX process was viewed as an ornamentation and diagnostic process which started with clean-up of the UI and was limited to fixing in-your-face usability issues that were reported. In a mark shift from this stance,

user experience even in product start-up companies now is getting aligned right from the requirement definition stage. User experience as a process now involves more that just finding answers for ‘who all will use the product?’ The process now looks to work in tandem with the business to define ‘What is objective of the product?’ and ‘What problem will the product solve of the users?’

As the user experience domain have evolved, user experience process have expanded to include specialist role such as interaction designer, content strategist, research specialist, data analyst, information architect, ui designers, information designer, icon specialist and the more obvious visual and graphic designers . User experience and design activities have also evolved to be able to provide value at each stage of product development lifecycle.

Getting agile in the age of short sprint cycle

Given that product development and release is now planned as short sprint cycles, it may appears that ux process have the task cut out to align itself to the cycles. But design or even ux process is oriented to be agile in the way it has evolved over the years. It is an iterative process and involves research, designing, testing and collecting user feedback to improve on what’s been put together in the first place.

To start with user experience as a process is aligned right from requirement definition stage, when ux professionals contribute to identify market opportunities, user needs, aspiration and document user profiles and competition landscape. In the design and validation stage ux professionals adds immense value by creating persona, scenario, use cases, wire frames, prototype, task flows, user journey, concept model, product specification, content matrix and define the experience template for the product.

As the product move in the development lifecycle to

the ‘build and test’ phase, ux professionals continue to provide templates, visual assets, ui elements in an iterative way. All along testing with the captive set of users and stakeholders how the product and features are appearing and behaving vis-à-vis the product specifications defined. Deployment and support phase become the most critical phase to help evolve the product and ensure a consistency in product experience. User experience professionals conduct user study, contextual enquiry, ux audit, usability testing and mine customer data to identify usability roadblocks and insights to further improve the product and keep up with the expectation of the user and the business.

Role of ux in the emerging experience economy

As we move from developing products to designing product ecosystems the success of a product will be dictated by how much the product fulfill the emotional needs of the users more that the functional needs. This requires a understanding of not just data, device, screens and geographies but more of users and wants, motivations, goals, behavior, aspirations, cultures and their expectations. This is where user experience will play a larger role in mapping the product development life cycle with the evolving needs of the users and behavior. Along the way contributing to define a product experience that maps to the emotional landscape; engaging and delighting the users.