Helping a potential startup understand the value of the design process
In June of 2019, our UX team was connected with a stakeholder that had a potential business idea. The company, Sanctuarial was intended to provide professional home organizational services. Sanctuarial had no current product on the market when we first connected with our stakeholder.
THE CHALLENGE — TWO WEEKS TO JUSTIFY THE VALUE OF UX
Our stakeholder had a background in digital marketing, having successfully started a number of small businesses and was currently working with a small marketing agency she co-founded. With Sanctuarial, she very much viewed this as another opportunity to utilize her digital marketing skills to build out this new company primarily on here own and wasn’t completely sold on the value of UX.
Our high level goals were to:
- Provide key takeaways and insights from research with potential users
- Create an interactive prototype that addressed both potential business needs and incorporated insights from our research.
- Help our stakeholder understand the value of the UX design process for her business moving forward and for a possible investor presentation
MY ROLE
Our team consisted of three UX Designers, Carly, Jess, and myself. I primarily handled the research phase of the design sprint while giving feedback and helping to run usability testing during the design phase. At the end of the two week design sprint, my team collaborated on a presentation that was given in person to our stakeholder.
As of the publication of this article, Sanctuarial is still in the development and fundraising phase.
KICKOFF — UX IS NOT JUST BUILDING A WEBSITE
In our initial meeting with the stakeholder, she explained her idea for a company that offered both a digital and physical product. If the clients were located within the greater New York City area, the service would be administered in the form of in-person consultations (think Marie Condo). If clients reached out beyond that area, our stakeholder was interested in providing a virtual service via a digital platform. Our stakeholder then dove into specific color schemes and layout options for the website she wanted to build which made it clear that while she was familiar with the UX process, she didn’t completely understand the value we could bring to this product.
The key take ways from this initial meeting were:
- Our problem space of home organization
- Communicating the value of our UX design process to our stakeholder through our deliverables and final presentation.
USER RESEARCH — TELL ME WHY YOUR KITCHEN IS SO MESSY
The level of organization (or disorganization) with a home is a somewhat private subject for people. User interviews were essential in this situation to gather qualitative data around a topic that could potentially be touchy.
Professional home organization is also niche offering, so our team needed to screen for potential users before directly speaking to anyone. Our screener survey had two main criteria points, we needed people that valued having an organized home and would be potentially interested in paying for a service to help them organize.
Our team conducted user interviews with 7 participants that met our criteria, asking open ended questions around the problem space. We utilized affinity mapping to identify trends in our notes from the interviews. The key insights gained from these interviews were:
- Participants find positive emotional value in organizing their personal space
- Participants use digital and physical resources when organizing.
- Participants had some sort of personal organization methodology or plan but struggled to execute or follow through on it
From the first insight, our team gathered that participants were less stressed and more happy when their home was organized. The second insight helped us understand the different resources users were utilizing to aid in home organizing which would help inform our feature decisions. With these first two insights in mind, participants were less stressed when their home was organized and could utilize a number of digital and physical resources to aid themselves.
DEEPER INSIGHTS — THE DISCOVERY
Considering the first two insights it was clear participants valued being organized and had access to resources, the third insight informed us that they still struggled to personally organize on their own. Our team dove more into this observation and pulled out some additional insights from when users were attempting to personally organize:
- Participants had difficult deciding what items to keep versus discard
- Participants struggled with discarding items with emotional value
- Participants struggled with anticipating the amount of time involved with the organization process.
“I get overwhelmed with the amount of stuff I have so I don’t like cleaning and organizing everything, it’s hard for me to throw things out” — Interview Participant
PERSONA BUILDING AND JOURNEY MAPPING — WHO IS THIS PRODUCT FOR?
As part of our goal was to communicate the value of the UX process, building out our persona was crucial. This document served as a clear and concise way to communicate our research findings and help our stakeholder understand who she was building this product for.
Mapping out Natalie’s journey when organizing her space was also essential to our help identity key opportunities for design features but also help clarify context of use. In our initial meeting, our stakeholder had mentioned building out a website but our team wanted to confirm that was either the correct product or provide insights into why another platform might make more sense.
Key opportunities from our user journey connected to the quotes in bold.
“This might take longer than I thought”
“Everything is everywhere and there is no end in sight”
These two moments in the user journey, when our persona overwhelmed and right in the middle of the process of organizing connected to allocating the correct amount of time to organize.
“I’m feeling sentimental about stuff and don’t know what to toss”
This moment fed into users feeling overwhelmed and provided an opportunity for guidance and support on what to keep or throw out.
“How can I make this easier next time?”
The user has finished the process to their relief but, as organization is a task that warrants repetition there is an opportunity here for an organizational plan the user is confident in for use in the future.
REFRAMING THE PROBLEM — FOCUSING THE SCOPE
Our team needed an actionable statement to help drive our design solutions moving forward. This was also essential to communicate to our stakeholder as a question formed from our research that helped drive our solution and design decisions. We wrote our problem statement with Natalie in mind, as to communicate to our stakeholder the value of keeping the user in mind throughout the design sprint.
When Natalie decides to organize her living space, she is overwhelmed by the amount of time required and not confident that she’s organizing her space in the most efficient manner.
How might we help Natalie with a clear organization plan and guidance on the best methods to organize her living space?
SOLUTIONS — LET’S DESIGN THINGS RIGHT
At the mid-way point of our two week sprint we had the opportunity to meet with our stakeholder and update her on our research and findings before we got into design solutions. Our team also took this chance to conduct a design studio with our stakeholder. The design studio was a great opportunity to include our stakeholder in our process and help her better understand how we were utilizing our time and the UX design process in general. Again, part of our goal was to help her understand the value of UX and what it could bring to this potential business.
The design studio helped our stakeholder hash out the actual flow or process of her product. Our stakeholder was excited about being included and had a lot of great input and ideas. In turn our team was able to interpret the features she’d mentioned and prioritize them for our MVP.
The key takeaways from the design studio were:
- Process overview for the product
- Time boxing feature
- Donate option feature for clothing
- Voice User Interface/Audio Guide
- Prompted questions to help guide the user throughout the organization process
FEATURITIS — PRIORITIZING FEATURES FOR OUR MVP
Our stakeholder was excited after our design studio with her. She had a ton of great input and ideas that she was hoping to incorporate into her product. It was our job as a UX team to interpret those ideas and prioritize them for our MVP.
We only had a week left on our design sprint so we communicated to our stakeholder that our MVP would include the features that we felt were absolutely essential to addressing the users needs in order to build out a prototype and test it within the time remaining.
One clear takeaway from the design studio was that her product should include a step-by-step organizational process. The exact look and feel of this process was up for interpretation, as well as any additional features.
A MoSCoW map to help determine which features should be built out was essential as it helped our group debate and align but also served as a clear visual to help communicate to our stakeholder why we included or did not include some of her ideas.
Our team aligned the following features being essential to our MVP:
- Step by step organizational process (with possible voice prompts) to guide the user
- User’s goals listed out to help them align on a organization plan
- Time boxing feature to motivate decisions about discarding items
- Instructional videos or inspiration to aid with specific aspects of organizing (ie folding clothing or organizing examples)
PLATFORM CHOICE — EXPLORING THE STAKEHOLDERS ASSUMPTIONS
At our initial meeting with the stakeholder, she envisioned this product in the form of a website. Our job was to either confirm this idea or provide alternate platform solutions from our research. The main points for platform choice were as follows:
- Context of use from our journey map showed that users would be using either a desktop, laptop or phone while organizing in their home.
- We explained to our stakeholder that a responsive website was essential as to not hurt the company’s SEO rankings and best practices when designing in today’s digital landscape.
- A responsive website offer the users the ability to be on their phone or tablet if desired while organizing
If you’re trying to organize a space within your home, the actual context of use is that you’re using both of your hands to move objects around. Google designers call this the “raw chicken” moment or a time when it’s ideal for the user not to have to interact with an interface.
With this home organization product there is an additional opportunity for a Voice User Interface. We mentioned this to the stakeholder as possible next steps which we explored more in our presentation with her and is revisited later in this case study.
INSIGHTS TO DESIGN DECISIONS — ARE WE SOLVING THE USERS PROBLEMS?
Upon completion of the design studio, MoSCoW mapping, and platform choice our team wanted to revisit our design decisions to insure they were still solving our persona’s needs, pain points and helping them achieve their goal of an organized space.
ADDITIONAL DESIGN STUDIOS — ITERATING WITH THE TEAM
Once we were aligned on our features and confident they connected back to our research insights, our team still needed to align on the actual flow for our MVP. We did multiple rounds of design studio with our team to hash out the flow of the screens for our step-by-step organizing process.
Professional organization is predicated on methodology. How you communicate your organizational process to your clients gives them confidence that you’re providing a quality service that makes sense and will help provide relief from a disorganized home. Case in point for this in Marie Kondo, whose organizational methodology became a best selling book and was in turn incorporated into Netflix series. The majority of interview participants mentioned Marie as a source of inspiration for wanting to organize their homes.
As this was the early stages of her business, our stakeholder was still establishing her methodology. Our goal was to establish a product that communicated very clearly a simple organizational methodology and could be tested and iterated on quickly. The idea was that, once we established a clear communication style and layout, it could be adapted to the methodology our stakeholder established. This was another key take away from our design studios were important.
MID-FIDELITY MOCK UPS
From our design studio, we aligned on our basic layout, user flow, and built out our mid-fidelity wireframes.
USABILITY TESTING — IS OUR PRODUCT FUNCTIONAL?
We needed to see if our users understood the simple organization process we had built out. Through initial rounds of usability testing with our mid-fi mock ups, we found that users completed our given task of “organizing their jeans” but were confused by some features within our layout.
This screen was critical to our process as it incorporated design features from our key insights but we ran into the following usability issues.
- The progress bar, users were confused at the lack of labels and not oriented to which step of our process they were currently in
- The timer, for this screen, the users would be timed in order to help facilitate decision making, users were confused at the pause/play buttons and weren’t clear if the time had started
- Initial reaction was that this main group of text was too much to read, users read through but noted that being timed and going through this much text wasn’t comfortable.
HIGH FIDELITY MOCK UPS — REFINING THE DESIGNS
Our main issue was cognitive load, too much information in one place. We were asking too much of the user. So our team iterated on different ways to visually break up and communicate these steps to make them more manageable and digestible.
First off, we reduced the amount of text in the instructions. We also separated the instruction onto an overlay that would appear when the user first navigated to this page, at this point they would have to click a CTA before the timer started, allowing them enough time to feel comfortable before the timer started.
Again, we wanted to keep our methodology simple to insure users could move through the flow. In giving these designs to our stakeholder, we communicated that any changes in the methodology would need to be tested.
NEXT STEPS — THINKING BEYOND THE SCREEN
At the culmination of this design sprint we presented our research and clickable prototype to our stakeholder. We educated her on our process and how we got from user interviews to design insights all the way to a clickable website prototype.
In our presentation, we revisited the idea of a Voice User Interface. Through our user research and mapping out our user journey, we knew there was an opportunity here for interactions with a VUI.
Again, part of our goals and metrics for success with this design sprint were communicating the breadth, scope, and value of UX design to our stakeholder. So we built out a basic Dialogue flow to help her understand the possibilities for her product.
In our debrief with the stakeholder, she mentioned how impressed she was with our findings. Even coming from a digital marketing background, she found our process and overall results to be extremely helpful in making this possible business tangible. Moving forward, her next steps would be incorporating our findings into a presentation deck for investors which clearly indicate how powerful the user experience aspect of this product will be.
