Designing Software for the User in 5 Key Questions
Running your business, chances are you’ve thought deeply about the experience your customer goes through finding, buying, and using your product. You may call this the customer’s journey, or you may use some other term for it. Perhaps you’ve even done this without realizing it, caught up in the flywheel of encountering and solving problems.
When we build technology, no matter what it is, we go through a similar process during the design phase. We call it the user journey, but it is really no different. The main questions are the same: how does the user get to the product or system? What does the user do next? What is success for the user? Is there an end state?
Today, we’re going to take you through how we think about a user journey, and the impact that framework has on your project. So let’s get started:
Step 1: What is the user’s motivation?
Every part of the software development process starts with the problem being solved. Another way to look at this is: what is the user trying to accomplish?
Software products are tools. They are intended to accomplish particular tasks in order to fill needs. As with any tool, there must be a task for that tool to accomplish. When a user decides to use a piece of software, there must be a reason.
The first step to understanding the user’s journey is to fully understand their motivation. Why are they using this, what are they trying to accomplish, and what is the ideal way to accomplish that goal? Oftentimes this requires doing some research with the potential user to really dig into what is happening today and why it isn’t working.
Once you understand the motivation, then you can begin to craft what their journey will look like through the product.
Step 2: How does the user discover the product?
This will depend quite a bit on who the user is to start. If the user is a customer, are they coming from social media or other marketing channels? Other products? Searches? If they are an employee, how are you introducing this to them?
Understanding where a user is coming from can give us insight into what their expectations may be. Depending on the link they clicked, they may be expecting a landing page or an ecommerce product page. They may be expecting specific content, or the ability to do something. They may be expecting to download a piece of software or an app.
Providing the right discovery flow can optimize the potential for a user to do what you want them to do, whether that is sign up, log in, or buy.
Step 3: What do they do now?
The user has discovered the product, whether it is an ecommerce site, saas platform, mobile app, or something else entirely. The next question is: what do they do now?
This is where optimizing the initial flow comes in. Whether it’s a smooth checkout process or a beautiful browsing experience, or a sign up flow that leads directly into a tutorial, the goal is to give the user easy pathways to the reason they came in the first place.
They need to get to value as quickly as possible, while feeling good about what they are doing at each step. We’ve all been through good and bad onboarding experiences, had good and bad checkout flows, been frustrated trying to pay an invoice, etc. In each instance, the goal should be to remove friction and get them to the action that they want to take.
A good sign up and onboarding experience can be the difference between keeping a customer for life and losing them after the first few logins.
Step 4: What is success?
Once you have them moving through the initial steps, it’s time to ask, what is success for this user? What is going to trigger the moment of delight and accomplishment that tells them their time and focus on the product was worth it?
Ideally, the goal is to get the user to this point in the first log in, or first check out experience. They hired the product for a reason. They should see how that reason is going to be accomplished in that first interaction. Getting them to a moment of success means that they will come back to accomplish the task again.
The best onboarding flows not only teach users how to be successful, they guide them to that moment of success through great suggestions, copy, and resources.
Step 5: Is there an end goal?
Success with a piece of software and an end goal are not necessarily the same thing. Successes can be incremental, a way of achieving a desired outcome, or they can be all at once. Additionally, not every system has an end goal, but some do.
A system may be intended to accomplish just one purchase. In that case, perhaps the success is finding the right product, and the end goal is the purchase. For this, I’m thinking about car purchasing sites. The success is finding a vehicle that fits your needs and taste. The end goal is getting the financing done and the car in your driveway.
But more often, there is no specific end goal. Most systems are designed to be used over and over, some for a variety of tasks. If that is true, then the user’s journey is ongoing. The goal is not to get them to some fixed point, but to bring them back again and against to accomplish a task.
Ensuring you know where the user journey is going and where you are in it, can help you to create an experience that delights and achieves. By carefully understanding, planning, and designing the user’s journey, you can ensure that the system not only functions as intended, but revolutionizes your business.