Improving product development with UCD
Overview
As Skilljar's first full-time Product Design hire, I needed to make an impact as a UX team of one.
During my year at Skilljar, I led design and research for key initiatives and projects to deliver customer value. To help me with this, I worked to infuse user-centered design into the product development process. Some of my key deliverables and activities included design workshops and creating Skilljar’s first user personas to make user needs and goals guide design decisions. Below was my process.
Internal Research
Learning internally prepared and helped me form questions once I started talking with customers.
I had many 1:1 chats with sales, customer success, customer training, and even leadership about their perspectives on the current UX. These helped me form relationships with teams that helped in future design and research engagements. I also formed follow-up questions once I learned something that needed validation with customers.
Workshops with teams that frequently work with customers and prospects was also a great way to learn about users and their needs and goals. Below is one of the walls from a group affinity activity I led.
External Research
Informed the product roadmap with remote interviews and contextual inquiries, which yield lots of pain points and frustrations customers had.
In my interviews, I always learned what bothered our customers. Lots of patterns repeated themselves, and this directly informed projects on our roadmap. When the time came to make improvements, I had rich data from interviews to draw from to provide the key context I needed.
UCD Artifacts
Design principles, Personas, and an Airtable sheet with research "nuggets" helped ensure research findings were easy to find and use.
I crafted design principles that guided my design decisions, and printed and hung Persona posters alongside the product and engineering wall. Additionally, I created an Airtable sheet based on Polaris Nuggets from WeWork that helped me log key findings in research.
Continuous Learning
Baked into our product, we try to encourage users to share their thoughts through a permanent feedback channel in the product.
During a product refresh I led, our team needed an easy way for customers to give us feedback during a beta program. I designed an easy to find feedback icon in our header bar that helps customers and prospects to provide feedback to our team.
