The goal of this phase is to create focus on what you want to achieve and how you will define success. Once you’ve identified that vision, it becomes much easier to understand and frame all the other steps you will need to take to realise that vision.
Once you’ve diverged to understand the problems space, you’ll need to converge to find focus from all the different understandings. The simplest way to do this is to start by where you want to end up. Focus on the desired outcomes that you want to achieve, and once you understand and have identified those outcomes, it’s easier to backtrack and map out all the things that need to happen in order to get there.
User Need Statements: Define Stage
The purpose of user need statements is to capture what we want to achieve with our design, not the how. This can be helpful for decision-making going forward as the team will have already agreed on goals and metrics to measure success. This allows you to ask if ideas or solutions will help reach those goals and objectives.
Define success metrics which is something that you can use to determine whether or not the project was successfulI
Define design principles, which will guide the way you think about your product as you go through the rest of the process
Write a future press release which focuses on defining how others will perceive your product.
Defining Success Metrics
Defining success metrics is important because it allows you to clearly understand the outcome you need to achieve in order to say that the project was successful.
There’s a lot of different frameworks that you can use to define metrics. The heart framework, was created a google, to measure the quality of user experience at scale. It’s a human-centred framework for measuring user success by tying metrics to end user goals.
The heart framework has five different dimensions; happiness, engagement, adoption retention, and task success.
Happiness is user attitude towards your product. This often might be measured through surveys or app reviews.
Engagement is how users are using your product in terms of frequency, or numbers, or types of features used.
Adoption is about how many new users see value in your product and start using it. There are lots of factors that can go into this, like marketing, etc but fundamentally the belief is that in the long-term, the better your product is, the easier it will be for new users to adopt it.
Retention is how many users keep coming back. Defined by specific time periods like per week, per month, per quarter, or per year.
Task success, which is more specific to the exact product you’re working on, it’s about understanding how users can complete critical tasks in order to be successful with your product. For example, if users can’t create an account, it won’t matter how great your social networking product is.
User Goals
For each dimension you’ll want to start with a user goal, then identify signals to detect movement towards or away from that goal, and then define metrics to measure that change. Not all dimensions may be relevant for your project and that some goals might have multiple signals and metrics.
What is a user goal?
A goal should answer the question of what are you trying to help the user do? This should be framed from the user’s perspective, for example, watching a movie. A signal identifies a change in user behaviour that can be used to understand if you’re meeting that goal. For example, in order to watch a movie, there are a couple things that a user needs to do first, like sign up for a plan and then find something to watch.
But eventually, the user has to click the play button. Clicking the play button indicates that the users found something that they want to watch. Metrics let you measure those signals to understand how much you are moving the needle.
In the movie playing case, you could have a metric that measures the click-through rate on the play button. You could also have a metric that measures the average amount of time a user spends watching per day. Note that these are two different things. Clicks on the play button represents starting a stream, but perhaps the user pauses and comes back later, and clicks the play button and again. On the other hand, watch time measures the amount of time a users actually spending watching something stream related, but they are measuring different things.
Generic example of HEART goals
Happiness, a goal is that users enjoy using the product.
Behaviour that indicates this could be responses to surveys and posting app store reviews. Metrics for this could be net promoter score and your app store rating.
Engagement, this means that users continue to interact with the product.
Behaviour that indicates this would be time spent using the product, and you could measure this behaviour through calculating the average session length and session frequency or how often users come back to your product.
Adoption is about new users seeing value in the product.
Behaviour that indicate this could be downloads and account sign up, and you could measure this behaviour through downloading sign-up rates.
Retention is all about making sure that users keep using the product.
Behaviours that indicate this are continued active use of the product and potentially renewing a subscription. Metrics that measure this behaviour would be churn rate and renewal rate.
Task success is very specific to a product
Should measure the ability for users to complete critical journeys
Design Principles what your brand will be known for…
Another method that you can use to help create definition is design principles. Design principles guide the development of your concept. Agreeing on design principles with the team is helpful because you can use this agreement later on during the decision-making process. This can make decisions and reviews easier later because you can refer to the already agreed upon principles.
A design principle is a short guiding principle that can be used to help shape the product by focusing on what matters most. You can think of it as describing the personality of your product. Design principles are usually expressed by a short phrase, generally just a word or two, and then followed by a brief explanation with a few more details to help everyone better understand.
When executed well, design principles can be easily identified by people who use the product.
Google’s known as being fast but also is taking the approach that less is more, which you can see with their search UI that’s focused on helping you get your answer as quickly as possible.
Airbnb is known for connecting hosts and guests globally around the world, almost like a mutual friend could.
Apple is known for being trustworthy in terms of taking great care to keep your private data private.
Ask the team to spend about five to 10 minutes individually brainstorming design principles that they think will be important for the project. Then bring the team back together and have each team members share their ideas. You can use affinity mapping to find common themes just like we did for how might we statements.
