Year: 2018-2019
Role: Design Lead
Plus: Austin Marticorena
Methods: User Flows, Site Flows, Low Fidelity Wireframes, User Testing, User Interviews, Project Planning, Discussion Guides
Year: 2018-2019
Role: Design Lead
Plus: Austin Marticorena
Methods: User Flows, Site Flows, Low Fidelity Wireframes, User Testing, User Interviews, Project Planning, Discussion Guides
Who are they? What do they do for a living? How old are they? Describe a typical day when they use your product. Are they at home?
Or at work? What time is it? Delivery? Carryout? Do they have a βgo-toβ spot? What kind of device are they using?
Describe the room that they were in...
Knowing your users is the first step to knowing what to design. Sure we have intuition and design sensibilities. Sure maybe our product managers have years of uncategorized, domain knowledge up their sleeves...but who at your company can tell me what percentage of people order more than 1 item? Or what's a typical bag size? Do customers care what app they're ordering on?
Some of these answers are based on quantity and some of them based on quality. It's the combination of those two that makes a good product design decision. UX research and usability testing can mostly get you qualitative data. Event tracking and having a good data analyst gets you the quant.
What we did at ChowNow was preface our tests with a lot of these qualitative type questions. If anything, it gave us a small generalization of the makeup of the online ordering space.
Who are they? What do they do for a living? How old are they? Describe a typical day when they use your product. Are they at home?
Or at work? What time is it? Delivery? Carryout? Do they have a βgo-toβ spot? What kind of device are they using?
Describe the room that they were in...
Knowing your users is the first step to knowing what to design. Sure we have intuition and design sensibilities. Sure maybe our product managers have years of uncategorized, domain knowledge up their sleeves...but who at your company can tell me what percentage of people order more than 1 item? Or what's a typical bag size? Do customers care what app they're ordering on?
Some of these answers are based on quantity and some of them based on quality. It's the combination of those two that makes a good product design decision. UX research and usability testing can mostly get you qualitative data. Event tracking and having a good data analyst gets you the quant.
What we did at ChowNow was preface our tests with a lot of these qualitative type questions. If anything, it gave us a small generalization of the makeup of the online ordering space.
Say that ten times fast. Ok. Great. Now, back to the tale.
When I got to ChowNow there was a void in UX. No task script, no equipment, no user list to pull from, no software to test with. So what do we do when starting from ground zero? Number one, order equipment: cameras, mounts, cables, software. Number two, determine what you want to test. Number three, write a task-based script ( this is good for the very beginning when you want to test certain scenarios ). Number four, gather some people
.
Number four was the hardest. People are fickle. Gathering 5-10 participants for a UX test... not the most exciting event. So you have to pay people. We decided to approach some internal ( see colleagues ) participants first. These people were cheap ( free ) and felt an obligation to help the company. We tested all the newly orientated hires in their first week...before they got jaded or knew the product too well . Gathering external participants was harder but we did it by using our contacts in the design community and tricking convincing local college students that it would be educational and fun. All in all, we ran our test pilot through 30+ participants in 8 months and made perhaps 10-12 improvements across mobile and desktop. Those improvements saved users time and increased conversion rates by close to 9% overall across mobile and desktop.
Say that ten times fast. Ok. Great. Now, back to the tale.
When I got to ChowNow there was a void in UX. No task script, no equipment, no user list to pull from, no software to test with. So what do we do when starting from ground zero? Number one, order equipment: cameras, mounts, cables, software. Number two, determine what you want to test. Number three, write a task-based script ( this is good for the very beginning when you want to test certain scenarios ). Number four, gather some people
.
Number four was the hardest. People are fickle. Gathering 5-10 participants for a UX test... not the most exciting event. So you have to pay people. We decided to approach some internal ( see colleagues ) participants first. These people were cheap ( free ) and felt an obligation to help the company. We tested all the newly orientated hires in their first week...before they got jaded or knew the product too well . Gathering external participants was harder but we did it by using our contacts in the design community and tricking convincing local college students that it would be educational and fun. All in all, we ran our test pilot through 30+ participants in 8 months and made perhaps 10-12 improvements across mobile and desktop. Those improvements saved users time and increased conversion rates by close to 9% overall across mobile and desktop.
The second half of knowing the mindset of your users is quantitative data. The only real way to get this is to track events somehow. This can be done through Google Analytics or something like Amplitude. We did this in a 3-month long pilot program to a small subset of users --> see my other project on here Going Green.
But how do you know what to track? Well, that's where it gets complicated. When you first start using a tool like Amplitude, it's easy to try and track everything. That usually leads to dead ends or just useless digging or double data. Believe me...I know from experience . The best thing you can do is make a list of the blurry decisions you made during the design process or the lingering issues with your current app and try to solve those. ( ie. how many people really click _____? or is it important to have a "remove" button here? is it being used and what's the path that users take when they do use it?)
The second half of knowing the mindset of your users is quantitative data. The only real way to get this is to track events somehow. This can be done through Google Analytics or something like Amplitude. We did this in a 3-month long pilot program to a small subset of users --> see my other project on here Going Green.
But how do you know what to track? Well, that's where it gets complicated. When you first start using a tool like Amplitude, it's easy to try and track everything. That usually leads to dead ends or just useless digging or double data. Believe me...I know from experience . The best thing you can do is make a list of the blurry decisions you made during the design process or the lingering issues with your current app and try to solve those. ( ie. how many people really click _____? or is it important to have a "remove" button here? is it being used and what's the path that users take when they do use it?)
Overall, operating in this way became easier the more we did it. Our initial plan was to have a quarterly cadence to usability testing. This ended up being put aside as priorities shifted. It was unfortunate. Though, I can definitely see a world where this works...as expected.
Overall, operating in this way became easier the more we did it. Our initial plan was to have a quarterly cadence to usability testing. This ended up being put aside as priorities shifted. It was unfortunate. Though, I can definitely see a world where this works...as expected.
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Β© 2022 Jonathan Brazeau
Β© 2022 Jonathan Brazeau
Β© 2022 Jonathan Brazeau
Β© 2022 Jonathan Brazeau