Key Questions to Answer
END-TO-END
- What is the E2E(end-to-end) flow and experience? From pre-onboarding, landing, to finish?
- What is the current process, tools, and use cases?
- What is the life-cycle and lifetime value of a user?
- How do users go about to discover what they are looking for?
- How do users go through search and navigation menus? Which do they use more and how can they be improved?
SIMPLIFY
- What are users familiar with?
- Principles
- Identify and question current assumptions.
- Boil down to the most basic elements.
- Reasoning up from these fundamental truths.
- Clarify the problem by attaching names to requirements. Create a data dictionary.
- Question every requirement, even those from authority figures.
- Break complex issues into smaller, manageable components.
- Do A/B comparisons until...then add to the main flow.
- At which point create option B or another flow? When there is another way or the process is no longer simple.
- Get to the bare minimum, then be forced to add back 10%+ of what was taken out to bridge data and gaps.
- Simplify and optimize (i.e. automate) only after questioning and deleting steps.
- Avoid improving processes that shouldn't exist.
- Simpler UX
- Simple architecture: high to low.
- Classify a process flow into stages.
- Consistency leads to simplicity and clarity. How can we maintain consistency?
- What existing components and paradigms can we use and create to reuse?
- Reduce the number of hand-off steps and silos.
- What process, features, data, or tools do we need to remove, add, relocate, and improve?
- Does the newly pivoting component, innovative design, or feature that’d depart from what’s existing justify its effort?
- How can we reduce context switching and allow users to get what is needed from one location?
- Make the content feel highly personalized.
- What can be standardized and automated?
- Simpler UI
- Start at a high level, with intuitive navigation to find hidden details.
- Group subjects empathically.
- Reduce steps, remove redundancies.
- One login or place to manage.
- Drive global consistency and adhere to WCAG accessibility standards.
- Clear context: outline, descriptive concise title, reference its history and sources.
- Address questions before they arise via tooltips, product walkthroughs, recommendations, banners or modal pop-ups.
- Map the architecture, flows, and locations: i.e. bread crumbs.
- No more than two to three taps or clicks to reach the destination.
- Display stages via stepper or subway.
- Smart defaults.
- Minimize swipes and scrolling. Provide a single glance display.
- If UI gets complicated, question the business rule.
- AI, automate, and autofill.
VALUE DRIVEN
- Data that is insightful with capabilities (high level to details, fast, reliable, secure, etc.) that deliver value to customers.
- Is the product or data what customers are really using, wanting, or needing? Perform user research and data analysis to validate.
- Add, remove, group, move, leverage toward new investment (long-term) tools. Can we use existing tools either what we already own or look to a new one?
- LEMI: Least Effort Maximum Impact.
SCALABLE
- Synch with other dependencies (internal and external), [design] systems, and tools - both what's current and ahead in 6-12 months.
- What is the market trend? How can we use existing designs of current trend setters?
- Policies, standards, and governance to move forward.
ACTIONABLE
- Clear direct actions to take. Show the next best step.
- Prevent error, self-healing.
- Help monitor relevant and personal information at a glance.
- Ways to improve or introduce CRUD: Create, Read, Update, Delete. Plus, audit history and archive features.
PERSONABLE
- Familiar to the user.
- Customizable to the user and also by specific roles.
- Culturally relevant.
MEASURABLE
- Assumptions are validated by users and its key success indicators: KPIs, OKRs.
- Meets what was assigned as the definition of done.
- Supports the company's mission.
- What data and metrics do we need to have and add to reach our goal?
- What features and data can be grouped?
- Which data should be shown aggregated and individually? At what levels?
- What comparable data or features should be displayed next to what is central and how?
SUCCESS MEASURES
Types
Company | OKR, KPI |
Design | A/B, NPS, satisfaction, task success, time on task, user error, system usability |
Usability | Delight, accessibility, ease of use, consistency, efficiency, layout, flow, navigation, memorability |
Engagement | Adoption, visits, views, bounces, conversions |
Behavior | Searches, votes, reviews, comments, search vs navigation, heat maps (hover, scroll) |
Time | Daily, weekly, monthly active users |
Data | Relevance, impact, statistically significant, with margins of error |
PM | Risks, milestones, quarterly initiatives, epics, stories, sprints, burn down rates |
Performance | Load time, reliability uptime 99.99%, MTTR |
Sales | pricing power, revenue income, LTV, CAC (customer acquisition cost) |
As a designer I emphasize what's listed top down. I set the baseline and measure along each iteration. If it doesn't exist I create it. What is important is that my design is improving and continues to iterate until ideal metrics are reached. With Sales, I share my experience and knowledge with the sales team and the upper executives.
Design specific measures
Net Promoter Score (NPS) | 65%+ |
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) | 78%+ [70 - 85%] |
Task success rate (TSR) | 92% |
User error rate (UR) | < 5% |
System Usability Scale (SUS) | 75%+ |
Telemetry team measure on dev or production
- Task Completion Rate, Time on Task, Error Recovery
- Performance: load time 1 sec 1 to 2sec, reliability uptime 99.99%, MTTR
- SEO: visits, views, bounce, clicks, cost per click (CPC), conversion
- Search vs navigation
- Engagement, adoption, retention
- Marketing effectiveness, statistically significant measures
Mediums used to capture data
- Methods: Interviews, surveys before, during, and after using Figma or Analytics tools
- Spreadsheet, set weight, rank
- Survey results from MS forms, Google forms, or online tools like Qualtrics