As a UX design company, we believe business objectives should be accomplished by reducing friction and creating simple, yet compelling, ways to improve the user experience. We’ve developed the Objective-Based Design (OBD) philosophy to deliver ongoing value to any project or business through iterative research, strategy and design. OBD is not just for designers—it’s a way of thinking that anyone can use—including you.
The idea is to focus on your business objectives and work backwards to determine strategies that will accomplish them. Your objectives can relate to huge goals or a simple growth project. A key ingredient to this process is identifying friction. Friction hinders your customers’ journey and it holds the secret to how you can design solutions to improve their experience.
This introduction post to OBD will help you discover your greatest friction points, brainstorm and implement strategies to improve the user experience, track the results and iterate your way to success.
What Is Your Objective?
The first step in the process is to define your objective and validate it. Your objective should relate to the part of your customer lifecycle that has the most potential to push your business forward. For example, you may want to increase user acquisition for your sales team or reduce user churn to increase average lifetime value. Either way, start with your best guess based on your current performance and user feedback. Once you land on your objective, you can use it to identify areas of friction to pinpoint clear opportunities for improvement.
Research: Find Your Users’ Friction
Research helps to validate your primary objective. Through surveys, observation and market research you can identify what is causing your users’ friction. Then you’ll soon discover that there’s opportunity to improve it. It’s vital that you gain insight into the current state of your users’ experience so you can determine why you’re creating strategies. Without first identifying friction, you’re just making your design different, not better for your users.
The first step in uncovering your users’ friction is to analyze your quantitative data. Dig into web analytics, funnel analytics, event tracking and heat mapping tools to gain data-driven insights into what’s holding your users back. Go deeper by looking at your lead-to-close performance ratio, or your churn rate.
Next, use these insights to drive your qualitative research. Start by having conversations with users, both those who did and did not experience friction. Simple questions, such as, “What drove your purchase decision?” or “What held you back from upgrading?” should provide interesting, helpful insights. Employ on-page surveys for quick feedback about the immediate experience and form-based surveys for more comprehensive feedback on their overall experience. For hyper-detailed audience analysis, implement online, or in-person, user testing to help uncover additional friction points that the quantitative research did not uncover.
Research will validate your objective and identify where you should focus your efforts to achieve better results. For instance, you might have been focusing on increasing user acquisition, but user data and feedback show that the greatest opportunity for improvement is user retention. In this case, your research should focus on the friction causing churn.
The research phase of OBD allows you to create a hypothesis around each primary friction point, which we call breakthroughs. Breakthroughs drive the strategy phase by spotlighting all of the opportunities to improve the user experience.
Strategy: Create, Queue & Prioritize Experiments
In the strategy phase of OBD, your research fuels ideas on how to reduce friction and create a better experience for your users. You can achieve this through brainstorming sessions with the whole team, including stakeholders, designers, strategists, developers and other roles, such as marketers, product owners, etc. Using the research breakthroughs as fodder, discuss ideas to improve the user experience. Use stickies or a whiteboard to record these ideas in the form of experiments. An experiment can be a big or small evolution to the current user experience. Once implemented and measured, you should be able to determine if an experiment helped you achieve your objective.
In order to prioritize your best ideas, you must assign a value to each experiment. On a 1-10 scale, score both your estimated effort (time and/or money) and potential impact (on the objective) of each experiment. To create a value, just divide the potential impact by the estimated effort.
For instance: If experiment A was a 9 effort and 5 potential impact, it would have a value of 0.56. If experiment B was a 3 effort and 8 potential impact, it would have a value of 2.67. That means that experiment B is more likely to succeed with less effort.
Your organized list of scored experiments becomes your queue. The queue holds all current and future strategies to accomplish your objective. The final step of strategy is selecting what experiments to implement in the current iteration of OBD. Sort your queue by value. Then, select the experiments to implement that will make the largest impact within your time and budget constraints. The remaining experiments stay queued for future OBD iterations.
Implement: Test Your Theory
It’s time to put your strategies to the test. The implementation phase should reflect your own design process, whether you have an in-house team or an external design partner. At Digital Telepathy, we wireframe, create design mockups, then develop and test before pushing complex experiments live. For smaller experiments on existing products, we may prototype using existing style guides and go live as fast as possible. No matter what your process is, the goal is to release your experiments quickly while avoiding disruptions to your userbase.
It’s critical that your quantitative and qualitative measurement points for testing the experiments are firmly in place. Make sure to annotate Google Analytics, add new events or funnels, and prep qualitative questions to assess the new experience.
Measure: Are We Winning Yet?
The measurement phase of OBD gives you the opportunity to collect and analyze your data to determine the effectiveness of each experiment. In most cases, successful experiments should remain as part of the experience. You can revert the design of failed experiments back to the original experience or evolve it in the next iteration of implementation. It’s up to you based on your iteration speed and your users’ tolerance for experience disruption.
Did you hit your objective in the first cycle of OBD? If you did, either A.) Consider yourself lucky, skip the next section and go buy a lottery ticket, or B.) Aim higher next time. In most cases, you are just getting started, so it’s important to learn as much as you can about why each experiment was a success or a failure. These learnings serve as the foundation for the next iteration of your research.
Iterate. Because Design Is Never Done.
It takes many attempts to design amazing experiences. Using our churn example again, let’s say your objective was decreasing churn by 20 percent and based on the measurement stage, you were only able to accomplish a 5 percent decrease. That’s better than nothing, but there’s still work to do. Since you are a pro now, we’ll keep it brief:
Conduct research to find friction.
- Discard any assumptions that were disproved.
- Find additional friction via the experiment data.
- Perform any new research needed to clarify your breakthroughs.
- Make sure to re-validate your objective and don’t be afraid to alter it based on your breakthroughs.
Create strategies to accomplish your objective.
- Generate and value new experiments.
- Discard or edit those in the queue that are no longer useful to reaching your objective.
- Reprioritize your queue and select the optimal experiments.
Implement experiments.
- Follow your implementation process.
- Drive exponential results with small improvements.
- Move as quickly as you can sustain.
Measure the impact of your work.
- Evaluate your progress.
- Determine next steps.
Then iterate as many times as it takes to get at the heart of your user’s friction and reach your objective.
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