UX as a Vector for Solutions: Technical Guide [3/3]

Introduction

Once the problem is clearly defined, you need to be able to find the best way to solve it. The Design quadrant, where the ideation stage takes place, aims to open your mind to an innovative solution—one that integrates as naturally as possible into the user journey. You are now at the final phase before putting your idea into action. After this point, going back can be much more costly.

Let’s take a quick step back to make sure you have all the tools in hand. Thanks to your research, make sure you have the following information:

• Real insights about users to avoid assumptions.
• A profile of your users (Persona)
• What are your users’ pain points? (Interviews, surveys)
• How do they interact with the product? (Observations, experience maps)

In this article:

• The experience map
• Brainstorming
• Placing ideas on the impact and feasibility matrix
• Evaluating Your Project

The experience map

The experience map is a tool used to visualize the key steps of the user journey during their interaction with your product or service.
Its goal is to understand, in chronological order, the users’ actions, emotions, touchpoints, and frustrations in order to identify opportunities for improvement.

Each step represents a touchpoint with the product or service. For example, in an in-store experience, entering the store may be the first point of contact. Interacting with a product on the shelf could be the second step, and so on. What’s important to understand is that touchpoints are defined based on the hypothesis you want to test. There’s no point in defining a touchpoint related to product interaction if your goal is to evaluate the customer service experience.

An excellent example from the industry is Lego: Designing the Experience – Example WOW.

Why Use an Experience Map

1) Summarize data from the exploration phase:

• Experience maps leverage physiological, perceptual, and observational data.
• They help structure this data in a way that is intelligible and shareable.

2) Complement to personas:

• Experience maps add a dynamic dimension to personas.
• They bring personas to life by placing them in action and interaction scenarios.

3) Identifying design opportunities:

• Experience maps help pinpoint critical actions and key moments in the user experience.
• They assist in listing design opportunities to address identified issues.

4) Final goal:

• Guide the design team toward innovative ideas and solutions tailored to user expectations and behaviors.

Have fun sketching the user journey to better visualize it. (Optional)

Brainstorming

Now comes the stage where you need to come up with ideas for your solution. First, it’s important to understand why brainstorming is essential. To begin with, brainstorming opens the door to innovative ideas by exploring different lines of thought. The second advantage is that it allows for generating a variety of solutions to the problem. These different solutions will later be sorted based on feasibility, complexity, or cost.

I highly recommend reading the article linked at the beginning of this section to get tips on how to brainstorm more effectively and to understand the rules of team brainstorming.

Placing ideas on the impact and feasibility matrix

Once your brainstorming session is done and you have several potential ideas, you need to evaluate which ones are the most promising.
To assess the most realistic ideas, place them on the impact matrix.

Dot Voting Method
Another method for ranking ideas is to hold a team vote to gather everyone’s input. For each idea, participants are given a certain number of points (often between 1 to 3 or 1 to 5), which they assign to the ideas they find most interesting.

Advantage: Helps identify the best ideas according to the majority
Limitation: May favor popular ideas, which aren’t necessarily the most strategically relevant

Evaluating Your Project

Once your solution has been identified as the most relevant to address the problem, you move into the production phase. Depending on the nature of your project, the first deliverable often includes an early-stage version of the final product—a sort of skeleton to check if everything makes sense. Then comes the prototype, a nearly final version of your product that users can interact with. For example, in the video game industry, there are closed access tests where only certain players can test the product in advance.

The prototype is used to experiment, refine, and adjust the full and final development of the product. It’s also a chance to observe user reactions in real conditions.

Now comes the evaluation phase. Don’t fall into the trap of abandoning the product once it’s delivered without ever adapting it to user demand.

As you’ve understood, evaluation is about verifying whether the design truly delivers on its promise. In other words, does it solve the problem you identified?
The goal here is to confront your solution with reality. You identify friction points, validate (or invalidate) the hypotheses made during the ideation phase, and gather concrete feedback to improve the product.

Key criteria for analyzing a user experience :

• Usability: Is the interface easy to understand and use?
• Accessibility: Is it usable by everyone, including people with disabilities?
• Efficiency: Do users reach their goals quickly?
• Satisfaction: Is the experience enjoyable and engaging?
• Reliability: Do users trust the system and the information displayed?

Tools for evaluation

These are the same methods mentioned in Article 2 of this series:

Neurophysiological

• Heart rate
• Electroencephalography
• Breathing
• Facial expression

Perceptual

• Questionnaires
• Interviews
• Focus groups

Observational

• User journey
• Conversion rate
• Number of clicks
• Navigation path analysis
• Task completion time

Conclusion

Finding a solid, realistic, and innovative idea requires a deep understanding of your user. Once you have all the pieces in hand, it’s time to generate ideas. Be careful not to jump on the first easy option—innovation happens when you dig deep. Finally, remember not to neglect the evaluation phase—it’s your pillar for ensuring continuous improvement of your product over time.