Congratulations! You’ve reached a liberating phase in product development!! At this stage, your research will have:

‍

• shown you know what your users want
• identified experiences and  pain points for users
• Provide knowledge of how your product fits into your customers' lives.

If you just read that and have no idea what I’m talking about, then pop those breaks on. Go and give our discovery article a read first.

Firstly we need to take your knowledge and figure out some form of design to test. We want to put the design work into buckets and figure out which areas need attention first. This includes how heavy in research or design those “buckets” are.

The design phase isn’t just about creating something beautiful, you need to design a product that is functional. That functionality needs to work for all your users,did you know that 1 in 5 users within the UK have a disability. That’s 20% of your customers.

Let’s take a look our three top methods at the design stage:

1.Co-design is best suited when we are staring from scratch with something. We have the ability to design with our customers. We want to learn what our users expect and when, its about understanding flow and functionality of processes.

2.Product testing and I’m not talking about a fully finished thing here (unless you have it!) We can test paper prototypes right through to your live service. We’re testing solutions and want to learn which meet both user and business needs.

3.Multivariate testing (A/B testing) aims to figure out design routes a user prefers to  take. We want to learn about what impacts the users experience, for better or worse.

Design is not about finding a single solution to one problem, but how a set of solutions can work together to solve a single problem. Sometimes, we have a solution that works great alone, but not in the full customer journey. This is why we combine multiple methods depending on what we are testing.

A design process is never static, because your users aren’t. Context and situations around users change constantly. UX research is about consistency in small studies. Next, we will look at how to conduct research at scale as your service expands

Some things being trivial and don’t impact your users, some much greater and leave us again in a state of unknown. At some point,you have confidence in your data and are seeing consistency in the user experience at small scale. Now, its time to figure out what happens as your service expands.

‍