Tamara Adlin from Fell Swoop ( a UX consulting firm in Seattle, WA) wrote a revelatory article about how important it is to know what problem you are trying to solve . Her client(Client X) was having all sorts of problems with their UI, including an inordinate number of users asking “why can’t I do X with your product”.
Client X asked how they should avoid creating such confusion. Instead of just jumping in to solve the (rather obvious & severe) problems with Client X’s UI, she realized the answer was much more basic: she needed to establish exactly what question their product was trying to answer. What problem was the product/website trying to solve?
Ms. Adlin explained that to properly answer that seemingly simple question you have to figure out:
Ms. Adlin explained that to properly answer that seemingly simple question you have to figure out:
- Who’s asking (personas)
- How they are phrasing the question (and whether that’s even the right question to ask)
- What answers they expect (how the personas think, vs how you think)
- How your company and products can answer that question in a truly fabulous and unique way (business goals, value propositions, and differentiators),
- What you want your customers to do in addition to getting the question answered (like buy more question-answering-devices)
- Then, and only then, how to translate all this into a UI that actually works.
While it’s mind-boggling to believe that Client X could have such an ill-defined product or website, it was vital that Fell Swoop got to the root of that problem instead of making the UI more coherent and usable. A clean, intuitive interface on a product that doesn’t solve the problem that the users is tryingto solve doesn’t really accomplish much!
Tamara Adlin is also the author of The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design.