Are you planning to embark on marketing campaigns or UI design for your business? Before you do, it’s crucial to ensure that you have a solid foundation to build on.
As UX strategists, we have seen many companies jump into these initiatives without fully considering the foundational work needed for successful business growth. That’s why we’ve created a checklist of key items each company needs to consider before embarking on marketing campaigns and UI design.
Problem-Solving: What problem are you solving in the market?
Defining and understanding the problem you are solving in the market for your users is the first and most crucial step. Without this, you could be building a useless product or service.
So, write down: What problem are you solving? Articulate it clearly.
Mission, Business Objective, and Value: Do you have them defined?
Before you start any marketing campaigns or UI design, defining your business objective and mission is essential.
Ask yourself: Why am I doing this? What is the purpose of my product or service? It can’t be just for profit. Defining this will help you to stay focused and have a higher purpose. Also, write down your value proposition, differentiator, and why you, not others.
Monetization and Scalability: Is your business idea monetizable and scalable?
Once you have defined your business objective, you need to think about how you will monetize and scale your business idea long-term. Put it on paper: How will you make it into a unicorn? How will you generate revenue? What is your pricing strategy? How can you grow it to make it scalable and self-sustainable?
User Personas: Who are your User Personas?
You must understand who they are to create a product or service that genuinely resonates with your users. By defining your target users and personas, you can create a product or service that meets their needs and solves their problems. Write down who your audience is, who you want it to be, and who your personas are. Are they based on your intuition, or are they real humans with a true need that no other product fully satisfies?
User Journey: What are the paths users take to get to and use your product or service?
Understanding your customers’ path is crucial to creating a successful product or service. What is the user journey? How do they interact with your business or service? By mapping out the user journey, you can identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.
Product Development Process: What is your product development process?
You must have a clear product development process to ensure your product or service succeeds.
Think of the following:
- What are your prioritization methods?
- Are you doing user research through interviews, usability tests, and measuring the correct analytics data?
- Do your features have a clear definition of how they should behave and how users interact through user flows and journeys?
- Are your features prioritized by what users need or what the technology requires?
- Are you building, building, building, or looking into solving problems?
- Are you copying what others are doing, thinking that the market might need it if they do it, or are you listening to your users to solve what they truly need?
UI Design: What problem am I solving with this design?
When it comes to UI design, it’s important always to ask yourself: What problem am I solving with this design? By designing your features with a problem-solving mindset, you can ensure that your product or service meets your users’ needs.
User Research: Are you adopting, acknowledging, and using user research as a primary user-understanding methodology?
User research is a crucial part of the development process. At Flat Cube, we base our UX strategies and user research on the foundational principles of sociology, emotional design, and universal design, as explained by Don Norman, the inventor of UX and author of The Design of Everyday Things.
Our strategists are Master UX experts certified by his group, Nielsen Norman Group. We believe user research should be a primary method of understanding your users and their needs. By adopting user research, you can gain valuable insights into your target users and ensure your product or service meets their needs.
The Right People: Are the right people empowered to make critical user-facing decisions?
Finally, ensuring that the right people are making product decisions in your company is essential.
- Who is making the product decisions? Are they the right people for the job?
- How do the departments collaborate and communicate?
Having the right people in the correct positions ensures that your product or service is being developed most effectively and efficiently as possible.
Conclusion
At Flat Cube, we understand the importance of having the right people in the correct positions. We can help you identify gaps in your current team and ensure you have the right people to make critical user-facing decisions. By following this UX checklist, you can ensure you have a solid foundation to build on and create a product or service that truly resonates with your users, leading to success.
It might not be easy at first to accept that there is a problem in the organization in the way it is organized and structured. That’s where we jump in. Once you accept that things must be done correctly, we’ll show you what and how to change it to make it brilliant.
The UX Foundational Checklist
- Define the problem you are solving.
- Find your Product market fit.
- Outline the mission, values, and business objectives.
- Make a concrete monetization and scalability plan.
- Understand, define, and include your user personas in development and prioritization.
- Understand the customer journey.
- Outline the Service Blueprint.
- Design and implement the exact feature development process to include design stages:
- User Research
- User Flows
- Problem definition and Ideation
- Prototypes
- User Testing
- Analytics data
- Development
- Measure & Learn
- Adopt and acknowledge user research – interviews, usability testing, and diary studies.
- Build your team the right way. Ensure that the right people are empowered to make critical user-facing decisions.
Don’t forget to check all these items before launching a marketing campaign or starting a UI design. Having a solid foundation and prioritizing the user’s needs and experience can ensure long-term success for your product or service.
