Author: [email protected]

Our environment has become noisier than ever. People have to carefully select what they pay attention to in their overstimulated daily lives. As a business, you not only compete with other businesses but basically everything your audience pays attention to. How can you have their undivided attention? Can we even ethically drive people’s attention? In this article, I will introduce some basic psychological principles about human attention, and give guidelines for creating usable and delightful products.

Year by year, more and more content gets pushed at us. After reaching a threshold, it just cannot get through the bottleneck of attention.

Humans behave in extremely complex ways. This means we cannot reliably predict our own or even our users’ behavior per se, not even as UX researchers.

To know how to get through the bottleneck, we have to understand how human attention works.

• First, we’ll look at some facts and concepts.
• Then, we’ll take a look at what we designers and researchers can do to create the optimal fit for their attention with our product.

Using psychological principles in design

“Digital innovations must survive the psychological bottlenecks of attention, perception, memory, disposition, motivation and social influence if they are to proliferate.” – says David C. Evans in his book.

Using psychological principles, by the way, also speaks to the sustainability of UX research. Of course, we shouldn’t skip talking to customers. Still, we can solve some challenges in product design simply by keeping aware of psychological principles related to attention.

I recommend it to every UXer. I strongly believe that becoming knowledgeable about these theories in context and then putting them into practice for screen or service design can result in a better fit for your customers while saving you a lot of time and energy.

10 psychological facts about human attention

Our mobile devices come with their data connection and endless possibilities available 24/7. This makes it ever more difficult to concentrate on a meeting. Or to wait for your order in a restaurant. Or to watch a movie on TV.

Teachers take away mobile phones in class. We UXers cannot and should not do that. When we want the user to interact and focus on our app, we can’t remove their moms talking to them or turn off the Netflix playing in the background.

Rather, we should design products with this context in mind and optimize tasks, user flows and the interface design for our users’ hypothetical level and type of attention.

In this section, I’ll introduce you to 10 psychological facts about human attention to keep in mind when designing digital products.

1. Attention comes in different types.

Let me explain about the different types of attention. What makes this important? You have to think about the context your product will be used in.

Can people really concentrate and pay attention to your product? It depends on the type of attention needed in the specific context.

1. Sustained Attention

Let’s consider a kiosk which customers place their orders with in a fast food restaurant. Imagine yourself in this situation. OK, this busy place has lots of noise and other stimuli, but also consider the social aspect.

People are waiting in line behind you; you want to eat and so do they. They would likely get angry if you lost focus, wandered around and took more time than necessary to complete the task everyone is waiting to do.

Most people in this situation would like to avoid confrontation, so they probably won’t pull their phones out to check their Instagram feed while placing the order. The design of these kiosk programs purposely makes the flow easy, simple, straightforward and fast. They don’t steer attention away with unnecessary newsletter signup popups.

2. Divided attention

Now let’s explore another scenario on the other end of the spectrum. Imagine you’re using a navigation app.

In this context, the focus of your attention can determine life and death. You can’t constantly stare at the screen – sometimes you have a split second to look at the navigation. That gives you long enough to see whether to go left or right, but your focus needs to stay on the road.

Because you can’t look at the screen, you pay attention to what the navigation tells you. It might even prompt you to look at the screen quickly to double-check that you are taking the correct exit while still focusing on the technicalities of driving: putting your indicator on, steering the wheel to slightly turn left and switching to a lower gear.

2. Not much differentiates us from a goldfish.

Your mind has wandered off by now… Did a Slack message pop up? Or did you remember something you wanted to check? Did you just smell freshly brewed coffee and steer away? Anyhow, if you are still keeping up with me or focused on reading this, give yourself a pat on the back! These days, this might qualify you as extraordinary. Even superior to a goldfish… Wait, what?

A Time article titled, “You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish” didn’t exactly boost our self-confidence about our cognitive capacities. It features a Microsoft study that found that our attention span had dropped from twelve seconds in 2000 to eight in 2009. A fun fact for comparison: A goldfish goes nine.

Should we just accept this depressing data and deal with the fact that we have to live and do our best with this ridiculously short amount of time for which we can focus on one thing?

3. Our attention might be shrinking … or evolving.

Despite the outcome of this research, many specialists doubt that our attention span is shrinking. Many argue that our attention span is not decreasing, but the way we pay attention is. Some would say that because of the mobile age, our ability to multitask has improved.

Others very firmly dispute this and say no such thing as multitasking exists. We can switch to another area to focus on or shift our attention. We can’t purposefully and actively pay attention to multiple things at the same time and process that information.

Those who say that our attention spans are not shrinking believe we merely react to technological advances and our overstimulated environment. We do that by evolving and developing better selective attentional processes. We learned to tune out things better and shift more quickly.

Another important argument measures up against the catchy but inaccurate “goldfish example”. It says the span of attention depends greatly on personal characteristics, but even more so on context.

Your products’ target audience most likely will have both the extremes. Some want bite-sized content and usually disengage with content in a matter of seconds. Others instantly look for substantial content backed up by a lot of detailed information with reliable sources and statistics.

Most people fall somewhere in between. Only continuous research will tell you how your audience interacts with your product in its context of use.

4. Content helps capture attention.

The Hungarian presentation platform Prezi released their 2018 State of Attention report. It found that for all generations, the key for engaging content lies in providing a compelling narrative and stimulating, animated visuals.

People participating in the survey reported improved focus over time in spite of all the distractions around them. Another important finding relates to multitasking or multi-device usage: “52% of responders admitted that splitting their attention across two or more pieces of content has caused them to watch, read or listen to something multiple times”.

Also, we constantly need to improve our ability to focus in order to retain information and get things done quickly and effectively. Out of more than 2000 respondents, 49% said they’d become more selective about the content they consume.

5. Attention-related differences have arisen between generations.

Besides the overall numbers, generations differ noticeably. Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials, who in some situations have to work side by side, develop very different patterns when it comes to attention.

The study showed that Millennials generally shift their attention away, multitask and lose focus more often than Boomers and Gen-Xers. However, they also felt subjectively that they could concentrate and focus more effectively and for a longer time.

That said, we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to the opportunity there. Millennials expect and enjoy a great story or a theme, as well as visuals representing and backing up the information. One-third reported they only engage with content if it has a great story, as it keeps them interested.

6. Attention and memory go hand in hand.

When it comes to information-processing, a lot goes on in our brain until we actually get to the point of making sense of the information presented to us.

Our working memory plays a big role in what we can process and the amount of information we can manipulate. But before all that, we need to divert our attention to the stimuli for us to perceive the sensory information – whether auditory, visual or even olfactory.

To sum up, attention links closely with short-term memory and working memory. The ability to manipulate information we work with makes up a mutual effort between focusing our attention onto something and also keeping those units of information in our working memory.

7. The brain: A biological machine with the best compression algorithm.

Many researchers set out to measure and learn about the human information processing capacity to learn how our nervous system transmits and decodes messages.

Shockingly, they found that even though 11 million bits of information come through our sensory system every second, at maximum capacity we can only process 50 when performing conscious activities such as reading or playing the piano.

This huge discrepancy between the portion of transmitted and processed information does not mean that more than 99% of the information just goes missing. This involves powerful compression. How does that happen? How can we compress all this information in such a short time?

First, note that we don’t have to make a conscious effort to process information and do this compression. It happens unconsciously, automatically. Second, a half-second delay occurs between the processing and the compression. Thanks to the multitude of connections between our 100 billion brain cells, that gives us just enough time to make that powerful compression happen. Amazing, right?

8. The Cocktail-Party Effect

We spend so much time online that we begin to safely assume we’ve developed new ways and techniques to filter out the irrelevant. We face countless marketing messages a day, personalized advertisements target us non-stop, and fresh new content bombards us every second.

Saw something mildly interesting in your feed? Too late. You switched apps because it couldn’t keep your attention. Or you didn’t have time to read that article at that time. Next time you open it, the feed refreshes. Good luck finding your post. The bottom line: No one has it easy. Not the user, the provider, nor product or content creator.

That said, we do have an amazing innate capability to tune things out and focus on what we consider important at that moment. The famous psychological phenomenon of the “cocktail-party effect” backs this up.

Usually, people at a party tune out the background noise and perceive it as a murmur in order to concentrate on their conversation partner. If they wish to, however, they can eavesdrop on other people’s conversations. But at that point they are not paying attention to their conversation partner anymore.

This proves that humans can only focus on one stream of attention and can’t divide it, at least when it comes to understanding speech. You can have a dim awareness of the music playing in the background or the approximate number of people around but still you can only perceive and pay attention to one stream on the level of assigning meaning.

9. Inattentional blindness: We don’t see everything in digital products.

So you have carefully crafted the design and the user experience of your mobile app or website. You didn’t want to burden and overstimulate users. Also, your business model didn’t even require ads. Uninterrupted flow, clean, simple, flat design – everything to think that your users will easily complete their task efficiently and without interruption.

But unfortunately, it doesn’t work that simply. Putting something on the small or large screen doesn’t mean they will process everything that has been going on in there.

Like with reading, even though we focus our eyes and attention on a small amount of space with only two bits of information per letter, we cannot process, notice and interpret all the written content on that page in a matter of seconds.

We typically don’t process the information from areas and functions on the screen that fall outside our attention.

10. Netflix and cooking go well together for balancing cognitive load.

I think we all have examples like that from our daily life. Most days, we face the challenge of finding the things we direct our limited and valuable attention to. Sometimes all the talking, visual cues and messages overstimulate us. In those situations, we learn to tune out many things and do some of our recurring tasks completely automatically.

Some of the inputs go together well enough. To mention a personal example, I can listen to music while reading or working or watch a series while cooking. I can’t however look at the screen of my tablet to check the recipe and do some precision work with my carrots in the meantime.

Two conscious processes with a considerable amount of cognitive load don’t go well together. Essentially, you cannot multitask two demanding tasks.

Designing for attention

Think about how the time we spend daily on the internet increases every year. Even though more and more stimuli surrounds us, with technologies taking a bigger part of our lives in general, our attentional capacity is not changing

From an evolutionary perspective, it could take centuries before neural pathways in the brain change significantly.

So we have to design for what people can do cognitively. We have to accept and take into account when designing digital products that human attention has its limits as a resource. Our ability to pay attention for a number of seconds is not changing.

Our actual activity is.

Profit-focused vs. user-centered design

The way we pay attention and how quickly we switch from one source to the other has a big effect on professions like marketers and UXers.

As one way to get their attention, we can simply force content and products on users with pop-ups, push notifications and sounds. With another, we empathize with them and alleviate the stress of over-stimulation at least inside our product, service or webpage.

This presents a great challenge: You want your business to strive, so you’d have to get your product in front of the user. But you also want them to have a delightful experience.

Designing for limited attention

UX designers have the responsibility for exactly what happens to the user inside of a product, how they comply with the human psychological bottlenecks, and how to align their product design with it.

We don’t want to take their attention away from more important things, and we don’t want to rob them of their attention. We just want to alleviate the cognitive load by requiring exactly that amount of attention required in that context to accomplish their goals. So, what can we as designers do?

I’m not going to tell you how to grab user attention. I’d argue that we can’t do it ethically. First, really understand how your users feel in the various contexts of using your product and service and design for that specific situation.

That said, some basic principles can help you not make your user think more than they should. People don’t like when they have to do more things or contemplate more than necessary.

1. Remember: The dial-up internet era has ended

Back in the day, we had to plan carefully what pages we wanted to visit and for how long. We had to “call in” to connect to the World Wide Web, and it had its limits.

Nowadays, most people don’t live with these limitations thanks to wifi and unlimited data plans. Because our habits have changed, how we interact with our devices has too.

We have to keep some changes in mind. We no longer have barriers and limitations like in the time of dial-up. So in creating your design, we have to remember that the user can go away and switch tabs in a browser or apps on their phone anytime in milliseconds.

2. Provide your users with only what they need

Clearly, state what pain your product solves so you know their desired outcome precisely. But how do we find that out? With research, of course.

You need to gather data on users from the most channels and methods possible: usability tests, user interviews, surveys, observations, heatmaps, recordings, AB tests, click tests and so on. Read about the UX research methods our design studio uses most here.

When you have found out users’ desired outcomes and identified their focus, you can highlight the information they need to accomplish the task at hand. Then weed out the distractions from the flow and the interface design.

3. Find out your users’ goal – if they have one

Our goals direct our attention. That means that if we have a clear goal at hand, we will direct our attention towards those signals in the environment we find essential to move towards our goal. We tune out the rest like noise and consider it a frustrating distraction. We call this functioning task-positive.

However, if we don’t have a clear goal, we don’t know exactly what to ignore and what to focus on. These situations make us receptive to anything that comes our way, except when it requires a lot of our cognitive capacity, conscious effort and concentration. The latter “mind-wandering mode” supports a broader, non-linear processing of the information around us – in other words, a task-negative mode.

4. Vary the types of content

Spice up long texts with images, GIFs, or videos – an app or a website or a presentation. No one wants to read long texts with no visual relief. We have books for that.

Also, a clear visual hierarchy makes the content easily scannable and comprehensible. For the visual hierarchy and the content you present, use very well-crafted and thought-out words. You can achieve it with UX writing and microcopy.

We know that people tend to willingly keep their attention on something they find more exciting. Scientific evidence shows that a page full of relevant visuals – images, infographics, catchy videos – provides much more excitement than a full body of text.

It has also shown that executives who don’t have the time or drive to read through corporate websites will much more likely dedicate time when presented a video. One with captivating, informative visuals that convey all the information but not more than needed at a certain time can make all the difference.

5. Pare it down

Give your users the minimum information they need to process. Even if you initially think you need a certain amount of text, minimize it. Remove words and even sentences.  

Removing the clutter also helps you achieve that pared-down effect in your interface design. Provide that breath of fresh air for your user between all those crammed-in products and other stimuli from the environment fighting for their attention.

6. Reduce users’ cognitive load – Use patterns

People already have a hard time determining where to direct their attention. Sometimes they struggle with unintentionally steering away because of all the distractions.

We UXers have to take it easy on them! Minimize the cognitive load for users while they interact with your product.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. Rely on patterns, users’ already existing mental models, and design principles. Apply Gestalt principles, use on well-known UI patterns, and go for that intuitive design!

But beware! Before you test it with real users, you can only assume they’ll find your interface intuitive. So make sure you see how it resonates with users and ask about their subjective experience.

7. Use observation and exploratory research

Without experience research, you can’t know if you have nailed the previous steps.

For measuring attention, don’t ask your users in a survey or make them think out loud in a usability test setting. Instead, conduct exploratory research and observe people in the natural context in which they will use your product.

Although no one has clearly laid out the methodology yet, lightweight EEG headsets like Emotiv can help capture attention levels amongst many other useful variables. Users wear the headsets while they perform tasks on a digital product and we get clear data on their attention level and cognitive load from brainwaves.

8. Always keep ethical concerns in mind

We can’t consider the topic of the intersection of human attention and design without taking a look at it from an ethical aspect. Many people say that tech giants today aren’t trying to sell to us anymore. The roles have changed, as we get sold and our data and digital profile has become that product.

I think many of us can’t help but notice this as emails, pop-ups, push notifications and nudges constantly bombard us. Keeping business goals in mind, we still have to put the user first. Not robbing them of their attention span by overloading them unnecessarily makes up part of that. If you want to read more about how to produce successful but ethical designs, check out this article by my designer colleague Attila.

Post Credit:-https://uxstudioteam.com/ux-blog/user-attention/

A good product roadmap is a very simple list of high-level goals you want to achieve in the next 3-6 months. This UX roadmap will guide your team (and everyone else) in the right direction. You also need to plan the next steps you take, which means planning the design sprints. Last, but not least, you have to define how designers and developers will work together. In this article, I will share how to do all these things.

A young product manager pulled me aside with huge excitement in his voice. He proudly showed me what he did the day before: a detailed product roadmap. It was a sophisticated Excel sheet, with every big issue highlighted with different colors, and the design and development of different features planned with precise dates.

I saw the joy on his face while he opened different sections and drilled down into specific details. And it just saddened me. How will I tell this enthusiastic guy, who just tried to do his best, that his roadmap is worthless?

This poor guy basically did everything you should NOT do with a product roadmap.

The inconvenient truth about creating a UX roadmap

There is an inconvenient truth about roadmaps that many people fail to understand. These detailed plans never survive the test of reality. When the first obstacle arises, they fall apart.

You can easily recognize it when participants start blaming each other regarding deadlines, and what was a dream project before, suddenly becomes hell.

So it’s better not to set exact deadlines. Remember, in agile the only things that have exact delivery dates are the things in your current sprint. Everything else is just an estimation.

Listing-specific features in a roadmap also don’t make sense. You can decide what business or user needs will be solved in what order, but in many cases, you don’t know what features will be affected in this early stage.

If your goal is to raise the conversion rate, for example, it can affect many parts of the product. Remember, our goal is not to deliver certain features in time. Our goal is to create a product that satisfies real user needs. And it is not always as simple as coding a few features in time.

So be careful if you meet a product roadmap with the following warning signs.

5 signs of a bad roadmap

• It has specific features in it
• Everything has an exact deadline
• It is a complex plan, with many details
• It looks like a Gantt chart
• Certain features are designed and developed at the same time.

How does a good product roadmap look like?

A good product roadmap is made up of themes. A theme is a high-level goal we want to achieve. It can be a business goal, like increasing certain numbers. It can be an engineering goal, like terminating tech debt.

And, of course, it can be a user-centered goal, like solving a pain we have recently discovered or designed a new user onboarding flow to the app.

In the roadmap, we prioritize these themes. Instead of adding strict deadlines we put down the order of the themes. It tells the story of how we go from the current state to the product we are dreaming of.

The roadmap is a high-level, strategic document. It should be very simple, with just a few themes in it in the right order. And that’s all. If done right, the roadmap can be used to communicate our product and UX strategy easily.

A roadmap is not a static thing. It has to be reviewed every 2-6 months, depending on the industry and product you work with. Roman Pichler has a nice graph about that. I recommend updating your roadmap together with your team on a ux strategy workshop.

As you can see, the roadmap is a product-related thing. There is no such thing as a UX roadmap. The roadmap lays down the direction the whole team goes. And we plan certain design or development tasks only for the next sprint. But this planning is not easy either.

Difficulties of planning the design phase

Design takes place in the early phase when everything changes fast. So design is difficult to predict. As we go through the process and get closer to the pixel-perfect UI design, it becomes easier to estimate the time needed for certain design tasks.

Let’s say we design an email marketing software. We have done some interviews lately, and it turned out that one of the most important pain point of marketers is presenting marketing results to stakeholders. In this super-early phase, we don’t know how we will solve this problem.

The solution can be either just a small new feature in the statistics module, or we might have to redesign the whole stats thing from scratch, or even create a new standalone product to solve this pain. It is nearly impossible to estimate the time we need for the design and development at this point.

After making and testing some prototypes and deciding how to solve this need, we can decide on the features the solution will need. When we have a feature list, we can estimate the time needed for design and coding, but it will be inaccurate, for sure. During the design phase, we will iterate on wireframes and user tests to find and solve usability issues, and we never know how many rounds we will need.

After we got the wireframes ready, and we agreed on the look and feel, we are able to estimate the time needed for the detailed UI design quite easily.

So the big question here: how to handle all these uncertainties and how to plan the design activities?

The solution: organize risky tasks into a simultaneous track

To solve the uncertainties of the early-phase design tasks we can organize them into a separate “track”, where product discovery progresses simultaneously with the design and development of the more mature features.

Some companies have dedicated discovery teams, others have dedicated time for these tasks. This highly depends on UX team structure.

After the discovery is ready (so we have a validated feature list that solves a user pain), we can pass the issue to designers and developers who will then create and publish the new features. We call these two discovery and delivery tracks.

The discovery phase is basically done by UX researchers and designers. They collect user pain points by doing discovery methods like interviewing and validating solution ideas with landing pages, fake door tests or testing prototypes.

The delivery part is done by designers, researchers and developers. In the delivery phase designers design low-fidelity wireframes first, test and iterate on it to eliminate usability issues, then do the detailed design and pass it to the devs who build them.

This dual-track system makes sure we can act on user needs fast, as we do product discovery continuously. The discovery team just passes validated, reasonably well-defined features to the delivery team, so the delivery team’s work is relatively predictable. They can have a good plan for the next few sprints.

Questions to uncover hidden design tasks

When the vague part of product discovery is done, and you think you just have to design the interface of the features, well, it can still be full of surprises. To avoid these, try to answer the list of questions below before you plan your next sprint.

• Will the new features affect the settings or the admin part?
• Do you need a user profile, or will the new features have any effect on the profiles?
• Will you need empty states?
• Will there be a dashboard?
• Do you need unique icons or a logo?
• Do you have to experiment with the general look&feel of the product, or will you just follow the existing brand’s look?
• What platforms will you design to? Mobile? Desktop? Native or web?
• Do you know all the steps of all the flows? Can there be a hidden step or a branching somewhere?
• Look for listing-details-editor triplets. If a piece of content has its own page, there will probably be a list and an editor too.
• Do you need any animations?
• Are there any screens with heavy use of interactions (panels opening and closing, drag and drop, etc.)?

Another important learning I always highlight is that you can not code and design the same feature at the same time. Believe me, we have tried it and it always ends up in chaos. Give developers features to build, when the design is ready.

Designers and developers should also agree beforehand in what format they will hand over the design documents. The handover shouldn’t be just an email, they should sit down and go through the flows to make sure everyone understands everything. And when something is developed, designers should check it whether it works as it should.

The 4 things you need for a UX roadmap

To sum it up, here are the things you will need for your UX roadmap:

• Do product discovery continuously and simultaneously with other activities to uncover people’s pains and needs.
• Hold a strategy workshop every 2-6 months where you collect and prioritize the pains you want to solve.
• The result of the strategy workshop should be a simple, high-level roadmap with themes.
• Give designers the time they need to iterate on prototypes. When you plan sprints for developers only count with the functions that are over the wireframing and testing phase, therefore you can easily estimate the UI design and dev time needed.

I’m sure many of you thought it would be easier to put together a UX roadmap. With this article, we hope that you will be able to put together a UX design project roadmap template for yourself, which you will be able to come back to each time you get stuck.

It probably is really easier to create a good old waterfall project plan. But this method with the strategy workshops and the discovery part will create a process that can generate business value continuously in the long run.

And what is your experience with roadmaps and UX? Please leave a quick comment and share it with us.

Take the next step to improve your website’s UX

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Planning a design OR a research project soon? Get in touch with UX studio and find out how we can help you conduct usability research and create a powerful UI that will appeal to your target audience.

Post Credit:-https://uxstudioteam.com/ux-blog/ux-roadmap/

UX professionals can choose from a myriad of methods when it comes to the product design process and development. This article will give an overview of the product design steps and UX frameworks we consider to be essential. We’ll also provide a toolbox you can pick ideas from when designing a Minimum Viable Product, the first version of a product with just enough features to create value and provide feedback for future development.

The ideal product design process can vary depending on different factors, such as the UX project scope, the size of a company, budget, or deadlines — just to mention a few. In a good design process, the business requirements meet the user needs, which are satisfied within the feasible technical possibilities. Even UX studio’s product designers don’t have just one crystal clear guide for design processes. 

Our UX designers often get together and share the experience and knowledge acquired from different UX projects we do for our clients. This helps us improve our design processes effectively, to meet the requirements and demands of the market. This is not only useful for a UX professional’s continuous development but also helps in designing a product that serves a client’s business needs the most. 

During the product design process, we encourage an agile style of work, working in design sprints, but we are flexible if needed. If you need help with product design, reach out to us, and let’s discuss how we can help you.

Steps of a user-centered product design process

We utilize the Double Diamond product design process with four phases: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver. The product design process starts with the product discovery phase. We do not define anything yet; our UX designers and researchers look into the problem space, pinpoint the problems that should be solved, and determine a direction for the next product design process steps based on their insights.

The second part of the diamond — Develop and Deliver — is mainly based on the product discovery findings. However, this is not a linear process. The Discover and Develop tracks can run simultaneously and support and feed into one another at regular intervals.

The Double Diamond product design process model

Based on the Double Diamond model, we follow four steps during the product design process in a flexible, non-linear way. In the next section, we will look into these steps in more detail:

• Step 1: Product discovery
• Step 2: Narrow down – Define
• Step 4: Brainstorming solutions, defining and prioritizing features
• Step 5: Narrow down – Deliver

Step 1: Product discovery

What problem we want to solve and for whom

Product discovery is the first phase of every human-centered product design process. Its purpose is to base the digital product idea on actual demand. While UX research is an essential part of this step, let’s not forget that carrying out research is not only important at the beginning of the product designing process but at any given product design phase. 

Whenever there are too many open questions and uncertainties, different UX research methods can provide solutions and validate ideas, which, in the long run, will help to avoid burning money and waste time. UX professionals reach out to both the stakeholders and the users to explore the problem and opportunity space and find the fundamental pain points that need solutions.

In this section, we’ll look into two product discovery activities our UX professionals frequently use at UX studio:

• Kick-off workshop
• Exploratory research and user research 

Market research findings are also important. At UX studio, we concentrate on UX research but if you’re curious about the differences between user and market research, check out our article on this topic.

Kick-off workshops

Meet your client, understand the current state of the project and the additional knowledge needed. Kick-off workshops are great for acquiring domain knowledge in a topic and get acquainted with the stakeholders. 

To create the first draft of our roadmap, we start every product design process with a kick-off workshop that usually takes about one to two days. At this time, we get to know the company, its processes, and roles and gather all information we can about the project. 

If our client already has some quantitative and qualitative data — about the market, client segmentation, competitors, target group, or buyer personas — we go through them, make a common understanding of the objectives and facts, and build assumptions and hypotheses. 

The best way is to involve the widest variety of expertise we can and get as many insights from different company stakeholders as possible. It’s important to understand previous solutions and key business objectives such as KPIs or success criteria.

Kick-off workshop techniques we frequently use:

At this point, most of the workshop deliverables are assumptive, and that’s fine because we’re going to research what we need to validate or change.

• Assumption matrix
  We collect the stakeholders’ insights on different topics, find the most important ones, and high-risk “leap of faith assumptions” so we can validate these with research and find out if they’re real.
• Persona workshop
  Assumptive personas are our best guesses on who will use the product and why. It helps us to recruit for interviews and for the client to empathize with their future users.
• Customer journey workshop
  These workshops help us get a view of how people navigate through the product or service. It is also an excellent opportunity for knowledge sharing with our clients.
• Value Proposition workshop
  We map out the perception of the value of the product identified by users.  We also validate assumptions and thus Value Proposition for each customer segment. This provides vision and guides the design.
• Brand Vision, Mission, and Values
  The best way to reveal the vision is by asking the brand’s key personnel why it was created. For every answer they provide, we ask them to explain the why. After a few rounds of back-and-forths, we get to the heart of the matter. At the end of the kick-off workshops, we should have a clear overview of what we don’t know but should do so we can create a research plan to kickstart our discovery.

At the end of the kick-off workshops, we should have a clear overview of what we don’t know enough about but should do, so we can create a research plan to kickstart our discovery. If you’d like to learn more about how to organize a kick-off workshop, check out this article.

Research

There are various research methods out there. The simplest method that requires the least experience and professional knowledge is desk research. It is available for anyone with a computer with internet access, an account for social platforms, and some time to dig up the pain points of online communities and find opinions and reviews shared in social platforms, forums, mailing lists, or blog comments. Diary study can also be useful in some cases. If you want to gather data on a larger scale, you can use online surveys — preferably with a mixture of open-ended and closed questions — that can be used with qualitative insights from other methods.

Research methods we frequently use: 

In the discovery phase of a product design process, we don’t aim to evaluate possible solutions yet as that comes later with usability tests. Still, we may already have assumptions to validate, and we certainly need to have a well-defined topic and a target group that is interested in our topic. At the same time, it’s crucial to keep an open mind to be able to discover entirely new aspects and problems of our audience.

• Semi-structured user interview 
  We use this method most frequently in the discovery phase of the product design process, as it’s relatively easy to organize and provides great insights. Starting with ten to fifteen interviews, usually provide enough understanding to move forward. We try to recruit interviewees from each segment or target group we defined earlier and involve the stakeholders in writing the interview script. Our researchers evaluate the previous results before each interview and iterate the questions to get the most useful answers from the remaining interviews. If necessary and our collaboration has the resources, we do follow-up interviews to dig deeper into sub-topics.

• Competitive research 
  It is very likely that by this point of the product design process, the product team already gathered the main direct and indirect competitors from stakeholder meetings and user interviews. More knowledge about successful competitors can aid us with feature ideas or design inspirations and can help us to position our client’s product. Even if there is no in-depth competitive research, we should at least maintain a competitor list in a collaborative spreadsheet or any cloud-based tool.

• Field research 
  Field research is an extremely reliable method as it is based on observing user behavior in their environment. But for this very reason, it’s harder to organize and conduct without influencing the users’ behavior and interfering with the natural way of executing their daily tasks.

Step 2: Narrow down – Define

This step of the product design process involves making sense of the data, synthesizing them, choosing one main goal to solve, and figuring out the “How” and the “What.” 

By the end of the discovery phase, we are likely to have enough insight to synthesize our findings, refine our previous assumptive deliverables or create new ones by user analysis, define the core problem we want to solve, build themes, and deduce potential fields of action.

From the many possible synthesizing activities, we’ll look into three methods — the ones we use the most at UX studio — in more detail:

• User personas
• Jobs-to-be-done
• How might we

These exercises can be used at various points of the product design process; at the beginning, in an assumptive way, it can help with synthesizing the research data and define the project scope, but it can also be applied when ideating about solutions. The when and how depends on the team, project, and available insights.

User Personas

User presonas are fictional yet realistic representatives or archetypes of our key user groups with certain goals and characteristics. We use personas to help us understand and map out the main segments of our users, with their different goals and motivations. We can also use them to help us empathize with them in order to design a product that is the most suitable for the users.

At UX Studio, we create assumptive, theoretical persona mock-ups at kick-off meetings. If provided, we can use already existing research data, such as survey results, built buyer personas, or other related market research findings, to start off with, but at this point in the product design process, our personas should be validated and based on real user research data. 

There are many contradictory opinions out there about whether it’s good to give names and faces to personas, if demographic data is relevant, if it needs to be printed, if it should include an empathy map, and so on.

How we create personas:

• We would rarely need to go above three to five personas, but the number depends on the project scope and product type; the broader the target audience, the more persona you may need. However, it’s better to iterate on categorization to avoid having too many personas as it can jeopardize the design process in the long term. It’s pretty hard to design for too many people with different sets of characteristics.
• We don’t spend hours and days creating stylish persona posters to hang them on the wall because we know they’ll change and get refined, so there is no point in wasting hours on this during the process.

• Our persona sheets include goals, motivations, frustrations, behavior patterns, background, and context-specific details (details relevant based on the project, e.g., which mobile platform they use). We also add a profile image, name, some personal details, and demographic data to help with building more empathy and make them easier to remember.

There are plenty of methods for synthesizing information, but we only dig deeper into the ones we use most frequently. You can find our downloadable persona template here.

Jobs to be done (JTBD)

JTBD is another framework we can use to find out more about the users’ needs and preferences. It is compatible with user personas, so we often use them together.

The personas focus more on the users’ behavior and attitude, thus help with empathizing and segmenting the different types of users, while JTBD places a more significant emphasis on features and aims to discover the reason why people choose a product in order to solve a specific problem and fulfill a need.

A famous JTBD example is connected to the milkshakes in McDonald’s. When the company wanted to increase the profit on their milkshakes, they first started interviews with representatives of persona groups, the customer types they knew to be the main milkshake consumers.

The researchers tested the temperature, the viscosity, and the sweetness of the milkshakes with this group, but they couldn’t find out how to improve the product. So they tried another approach.

They started observing and interviewing consumers on-site in McDonald’s restaurants. It turned out that people bought milkshakes mainly to keep them full till lunch and entertain them for the whole journey of driving to work. As a result, McDonald’s made the shake thicker in order to last longer while commuting.

They also moved the milkshake machine from behind the counter to the front, where the customers could easily and rapidly buy a milkshake with a prepaid card when rushing to work and avoid queues. Solving the real job to be done resulted in a sevenfold increase in the sales of the milkshake.

The HMW exercise is a great way to narrow down problems and discover possible opportunity areas. 

We are not looking for exact solutions here yet, but rather brainstorm, explore questionable areas of core challenges while keeping an open mind for innovative thinking. For this to work, first, we need a clear vision or goal, a Point of View statement based on a deeper user need discovery. The POV should be human-centered, neither too narrow, to sustain creative freedom when brainstorming, nor too broad, so it remains manageable. 

For defining the POV statement, personas and JTBDs we made earlier in the design process come in handy. By synthesizing the essential needs to fulfill, we make a template to create a statement.

In short:  [User . . . (descriptive)] needs [Need . . . (verb)] because [Insight . . . (compelling)]

Once we have the POV statement, we are ready to form short questions that can launch brainstorming on actionable ideas. For example:

• How might we…? 
  What’s stopping us from…?
  In what ways could we…?
  What would happen if…? 

Then we may ask follow-up questions on the previous questions to examine the angles a bit deeper. By completing HMW sessions, we can get one step closer to forming ideas about exact solutions and executing the best ones.

By this point, we should have a condensed brief of research findings, a strategy, and a clear idea about what problem we want to solve.

At this stage of the product design process we’re far from creating high-fidelity prototypes and design systems, but it’s important to set a couple of broad, basic directions to have a general idea of where we’re heading and keep nurturing the creative imagination as we progress in the design process. Creating moodboards or a brand wheel can be a useful way to summarize our findings and have a point of reference during the next steps.

Depending on how many designers are working on a project, we can share the workload and either work on the same design or split up the tasks and progress simultaneously (e.g., one does the prototyping and the other building the design system and hi-fi part).

Step 3: Brainstorm solutions, define and prioritize features

The techniques we mention here can be done or can at least be started way before this step; remember, this is not a linear process, and it is possible to use these techniques in a different order or at different times of the project timeline.

The ideation phase begins when we have a good understanding of the project goals, and we narrowed down what we want to solve first.

If there are still open questions about what features we should start with, the Kano model and the Impact-Effort Matrix can be helpful aids.

User journeys and customer journeys

User journeys and customer journeys are tools for mapping out the flows users go through when using a service or an application with one specific task to carry out. 

Customer journeys and experience maps encounter the online and offline aspects of the users’ flow, providing a more holistic view of the process. As the output, the customer journey diagram lays out a big table. The columns of the table represent different phases or steps a customer goes through. These can be unique in every project, but most customer journeys contain three phases: before, during, and after the usage of our product.

Opposed to customer journeys, user journeys analyze a smaller part of the journey, focusing only on what happens in the application, for example, during a sign-up process. At UX studio, we mainly use user journeys, but for longer projects with a bigger scope, especially if there is already existing user data about the customers and there is a journey that goes beyond application usage (e.g., arriving at the airport and using a ticket machine software), the customer journey is the preferred tool.

How we make user journeys: 

• To start off, we determine the two or three most important goals the product should achieve. Every journey must have a task, motivation, and context.
• It’s also good to include a simplified empathy map nested within the journey map, indicating what emotional reaction the user has at each step. These are good indicators for us on which points we should handle with extra care or improve. These emotions can be assumptive but can also be based on solid data we gathered from our product discovery and research before. 
• Creating user journeys is still part of the experimental phase. We don’t stop with one idea but try out different paths, reorganize the steps, complete the ideas, and explore. 
• We want to find many different versions for each journey, as sometimes there are great first ideas, but oftentimes these are not the best solutions. For this reason, we create at least three different journeys for each goal. Then, once we come up with several solutions, decide on the winner.

User stories

User story creation is a good way to define features with stakeholders. What we want to accomplish in the product, why, and as what kind of user. It helps us stay focused on what features are necessary to focus on during the upcoming product design phases and reminds us what could lead to a “feature creep.”

High-level example:

As a sales agent, I want to turn more leads into customers so I can increase my income.

And a more detailed version of the example above:

As a sales agent, I want to keep track of unprocessed hot leads so I can make sure I don’t miss out on an ‘easy’ deal.

We can create user stories in several ways and styles. If we work on it with developers, it may become more technical and scrum-oriented.

Building the IA, sketching and wireframing

Building an Information Architecture is basically creating the blueprint of our design structure, the foundation of our first wireframes. IA is formed by creating a hierarchy and categorization of the information we gathered during the product designing process that results in a coherent, meaningful, navigable system.

How we sort out the features, functions, and available data in our product will significantly impact the user experience. Our best intentions with features can vanish if users don’t find them. 

Card sorting is a great technique to validate our information architecture. We can do it on paper, but there are some online tools that can be very helpful too.

Sketching

We can start sketching early in the product design process when the first problems gain their shapes. Sketching is great not only because it can serve as a base when building something, but it also helps understand a problem. It also makes sharing ideas within the team easier.

Sketching on paper, where complex interfaces and functions of the software don’t limit or distract us, is an effective and rapid way to explore ideas and spot any design problems early on. 

We don’t need to be skillful sketch artists or graphic designers who can draw and paint photo-realistically. The point here is not to create refined artifacts but to focus on ideas, flows, and possible layouts and use simple placeholder boxes for images and text. It’s about exploring execution ideas, so we don’t need to worry about the copy either at this phase. 

It’s very useful to showcase the first sketches and wireframes with developers and other team members early on in the process.  When we do so, they can share information on what is technically feasible and what is not, saving us from unnecessary rework.

The output of sketching is a wireframe, which is basically the skeleton of our upcoming prototypes — a barebone, static structure that will soon evolve into a refined design. A blank paper and a pencil are all we need, but using mock-ups for guidance can be helpful. Wireframes can also be made on digital platforms, using tools such as Axure, Adobe XD, Sketch, Figma, or even Photoshop.

By this point, we have a clear concept of what we have to do to design a product successfully, our strategy, and how to prioritize. We defined our MVP, the core features, and the core problem we want to focus on solely.

Step 4: Narrow down – Deliver

Prototype, test, iterate, implement.

This product design phase is all about doing the right thing in the right way. Reaching our goal, refining our MVP, and implementing the solutions.

Low-fidelity Prototyping

Making our ideas tangible with quick prototypes and test them as soon as we can save a lot of time and resources. For the sake of definition, what we call a prototype here is a modest-looking clickable digital product that resembles the features we aim to develop but in a simplified way. 

Paper-based prototypes exist too, but we prefer the freedom and opportunities digital solutions can provide. The goal here is to find the usability issues before starting the detailed designs to avoid wasting time and doing unnecessary reworks.

How we build prototypes:

• We mainly use Axure for interactive low-fi prototypes. With Axure, we can add dynamic elements, Javascript, or create databases. These are uniquely complex features in the world of prototyping tools.
• There are always three essential questions the user should be able to answer on every screen we design: Where am I? What can I do here? How can I move forward?
• Forget lorem ipsum and be scarce with dummy text. A sensible, contextual, guiding copy is just as important as visual hierarchy and affordances.
• We follow UI patterns and keep best practices in mind.
• We keep it simple. We’re testing the usability of layouts, key user flows, and navigation at this point. We don’t test refined visuals yet unless it’s not an MVP and we are testing already existing features in a live product.
• We design for mobile first if the project allows.

We create the first prototypes as soon as we can and evaluate them for usability tests. Refining the prototype iteratively after every usability test until we’re confident that we ruled out every major usability risk is a must. Of course, later on, we continue usability testing before and during designing every new feature.

High-fidelity prototyping

Now that we have the base of a usable product, it’s time to add the visual attributes, colors, icons, shadows, and images and refine the look and feel. The product’s design language has to be in harmony with the target audience, and it should be aligned with the brand’s vision. When testing the high-fidelity prototypes, visual elements are also important, and they lead to creating a stable, harmonized design system that we can rely on. 

Quick tips for hi-fi prototypes:

• Create and maintain a design system based on brand guidelines and vision. Design systems facilitate effective collaborative work, alleviate decision fatigue, and assist designers in keeping consistency throughout the product. Even if it’s an MVP, the goal is to scale up the product if everything goes right, so building a design system is inevitable at some point when managing a successful product design process. It’s better to start building it sooner rather than later. 
• We mainly use Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD at UX studio, however, the choice often depends on the preferences of our client’s team and the technical requirements. 
• Some tools, like Figma, have a built-in collaborative feature, but Abstract also can be a great complementary software for version control and storing files in the cloud. We export our design files to Zeplin for the developers.
• Ideating and prototyping should be an iterated process, such as continuous discovery with user research beyond MVPs.

Takeaways

Launching the minimum viable product doesn’t mean the job is done, and the product design process is over. Testing and designing should be an ongoing, iterative process. This is the key to improve the product and bring it to success.  

Follow along with the metrics. Get client feedback, use analytic tools and heatmaps, do A/B testing, and measure the success of our choices.  

This collection of ideas and steps we went through are not set in stone, simply an overview of available tools and methods we consider necessary to start off a product design process. The whole process becomes super iterative when working in a dynamic, agile environment. 

The main takeaways are to make the process user-centered, apply design thinking, and execute it as a non-linear, iterated process. Do user research whenever possible to design with the people, not just for them.

Searching for the right UX agency?

UX studio has successfully handled 250+ collaborations with clients worldwide. Is there anything we can do for you at this moment? Get in touch with us, and let’s discuss your current challenges. Our experts will be happy to assist with the UX strategy, product and user research, and UX/UI design.

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How does color psychology affect users’ attitudes and behaviour? There is a master trick, which can help to build a digital product which works more effectively. Psychological effects of color on our experience and decision-making matter, so let’s see how this affects the users and what sort of principles exist when designing experiences.

Color is an essential instrument in any designer’s tool stack. Studies covering color psychology and more specifically, psychological effects of color on human behavior show that it takes 90 seconds for a customer to form an opinion about a product and 90% of the time, this opinion is influenced by colors. In spite of the fact that color is usually viewed as only an aesthetic decision of the designers, it is a core element of the emotional and cognitive impact of a design on users.

Color is also the easiest element to remember when it comes to encountering new things. The concepts of color psychology can be applied in user experience design as well as marketing.

Color Psychology and Color-Emotion Associations

Research shows that light and color can affect our mood, sleep, heart rate, and even our well-being. An interesting example can be seen in our daily lives: blue and green light (e.g the nature and sky) encourage us to wake up in the morning. This is why many doctors and scientists recommend against using our mobile devices before going to bed as the screen’s light keeps us awake and can even cause insomnia.

Considering that there is a vast amount of possible color mixtures that can be created, it might be difficult to determine which one will have the greatest influence on a website or app. It would be too complex to examine everything, but there are a few tricks and related trends on how color affects users’ attitudes and behavior. 

A well-considered color palette can upgrade a design from good to great, while a mediocre or lousy color palette can lessen users’ overall experience and even intervene with their ability to use a site or app properly.

Colors can stimulate the emotions of many people. Check out the following color psychology figure below to see some of the impressions and themes traditionally associated with colors:

If you’d like to learn more about color meanings, and the psychology of color in advertising, check out Canva’s interactive tool on the meaning and symbolism of colors.

Color preferences

Depending on their age, gender, and the impulsivity of their actions, users have different reactions to colors and shades. Although color preferences are not universal, there are universal differences between genders’ preference in some colors over others. Also, color preferences can depend on the age. In the following sections, I will discuss color preferences depending on age, gender, and how they can be perceived differently in various cultures.

Age

When marketing your business, it is necessary to know who your target audience is, in order to tailor your marketing efforts accordingly. When researching users and their demographics, age is an element that should be examined carefully. Your target audience’s age influences their perception of marketing materials, especially considering that color taste and preference varies based on age.

In the book Color Psychology and Color Therapy, Faber Birren investigates which colors are desirable for different age groups. Considering the color psychology of blue and red, he found that blue is consistently preferable throughout life. Yellow is preferred in childhood, which preference tends to decline as we age. As people mature they favor colors of shorter wavelength (blue, green, violet) rather than colors of longer wavelength (red, orange, yellow).

As the chart below shows, while most audiences like energetic and saturated colors, older people often think that garish bright colors are repulsive. So when designing a product or marketing material for older users, you should be cautious with bright colors — too vibrant can decrease the conversion.

Gender differences: Men vs Women

Is there a difference between genders with regard to their response to color? Although findings are ambiguous, various studies continue to indicate that men and women have varying preferences when it comes to masculine and feminine colors choices. Research on color perception indicates that men favor bright, contrasting colors, while women prefer softer shades. Both men and women like blue and green, but many women adore purple while this color repels men.

Cultural Differences in Color

Besides age and gender, one more factor that influences our color preferences is our cultural background. For instance, in most Western cultures, the color white is linked with aspiration, innocence, chastity, and hope. But in parts of Asia, white is associated with bad luck, death, and mourning.

It’s crucial for those involved with web and user experience design to look at the cultural connotations of the color palettes based on the relevant target audience for the website or product. For instance, designers can pay less attention to the implications the chosen palette may have in other cultures when the product is primarily targeting a particular culture. To prevent negative cultural connotations, for products that target a global audience, a balance between the colors and imagery is required.

The 60-30-10 rule

The 60-30-10 rule is a theory for making color palettes that are aesthetically pleasing and adequately balanced. The purpose is that one color, usually something rather neutral makes up 60% of the palette. An additional supplementary color makes up 30% of the palette. And then a third color is used as an accent for the rest 10% of the design.

This approach makes it much simpler for designers to set up the trial and error with original or uncommon color palettes without going too much beyond the anticipated norms within a business brand or industry. Choosing a set of some uncommon hue can lift the aesthetics and design. Additionally, it can be the first move toward generating a brand palette that is much more progressive than the one of its competitors, thereby setting the brand apart, making it more distinguished and remarkable.

Color psychology & visual hierarchy for UX 

When it comes to setting a brand apart from others, the brand’s choice of color is a fundamental element that reinforces both its personality and the qualities of the products or services it offers. 

Also, one of the vital roles of color in the field of marketing, user experience, and behavioral design is using it to influence where people look. If users don’t look at your navigational system, your product won’t be usable. In digital psychology, one of the fundamental skills you need to master is the art of controlling where your users look. In most design work, we control user attention by increasing and decreasing the salience of visual design elements.

Impact of color on conversion rates

Okay, let’s delve into the exciting stuff, the psychology of colors in business and the colors that increase the purchase rate. In other words, the colors that sell. How can we use color theory and psychology to get people to click on a button? What colors are really going to boost the conversion rates and improve the bottom line?

There’s always been a debate between conversion rate optimization experts, arguing whether the color red is more eye-catching color for a button, or green because that means “go.” There are plenty of A/B test results that show how a change in the color of a CTA button made a drastic impact on signups. HubSpot shared the following famous test from their early days when they were known as Performable:

Even though Hubspot initially estimated the green button would lead to a higher conversion rate and perform better, the red button outperformed by 21% more clicks. 

The bad news is that there isn’t a magical color that consistently performs best for all websites. However, there are some general rules that can help you use color to your advantage. Here at UXStudio, we work with clients to ensure that their products and services are designed with the target audience in mind, and therefore implementing color and design elements that lead to the highest conversion rate.

Questions for testing color choices

Here are a couple of test questions you can ask users when you’re testing out your color choices. Although, you are not going to ask about colors explicitly but you can figure out users’ perceptions of your brand and design with the following questions.

• Before visiting (this website/app), please tell us how do you expect the site/app to look like?
• How would you describe this site/app?
• What are your first impressions? The first keywords that come to your mind when you see the web/app.
• Where would you click/tap first? why?
• On a scale of 1 (very unpleasant) to 5 (very pleasant), how did this site/app make you feel?
• How likely or unlikely would you be to trust this company?
• Can you think of any other companies that have very similar offerings? How would you compare this company to them?

All in all, trust your eyes

As a recap here is a short list to keep in mind for a well-colored digital product:

• Color can affect on everyday behaviour as well as stimulate emotions in people, what is more, every single color has a special meaning. Before deciding the main colors of an app, checking a color palette will definitely help you to find the perfect matching tone with the right message.
• There are universal differences between genders’ preference in some colors over others, additionally color preferences can depend on the age too. Take care of your target audience while choosing the perfect color for your digital product.
• Color is just one thing, but people who will use your product are more important! Remember HubSpot’s Call To Action’s color test and the fact that there are no magic in the field of colors just a well defined target audience.
• Use the given questions while testing your color choices!

Continue learning with UX Studio

As UX/UI Designers and Researchers we know why people will love your product and which techniques will help you to create fantastic websites/apps that people will love to use. For more read our other post: Designing Apps For Seniors: 5 Traits Worth Considering

For additional reading, check out our Product Design book by our CEO, David Pasztor. We ship worldwide!

Make sure to check out this great guide by Design Wizard on Color Theory. It explores primary colors, secondary colors, tertiary colors, and monochromatic colors. There is also a detailed section on the meaning of colors, and branding!

Post credit:-https://uxstudioteam.com/ux-blog/color-psychology-in-ux-design/