Intent-Driven Design

Let’s address the elephant in the room: design research is never really done. We capture questions from all of our stakeholders, send out surveys, host interviews, and conduct contextual research. But questions lead to answers and even more questions, and even more research. For the insatiable UX researchers, marketing campaigners, designers, and strategists here, we know that feeling — and the frustration of research not making it into a project plan.

An approach to the ‘just right’ research is fourfold:

1. Know what you don’t know. Gather all your assumptions and knowledge gaps, then draft questions that will fill them.

2. Draft a set of learning objectives and share it around to make sure there’s understanding on what the research will gather.

3. Create a prototype of something (yes, as part of research) that can be put in front of people, and see how it performs. We don’t call it ‘validation’ because we don’t assume that we’re right.

4. Follow a directional, 2-week (agile) experimentation sprint that can run in tandem with design or development sprints depending on the phase of the project.

Understand Behavior
Know what you don’t know. Gather all your assumptions and knowledge gaps, then draft questions that will fill them.

Capture Intent
Informed user intent. Follow a directional, 2-week(agile) research sprint to understand the intent of users informed by user behavoirs.

Design Intent
Create prototypes. A collaborative process based on specific measures of success, rapid prototyping, and continuous testing and improvement that can be put in front of users.

For identifying moments, this almost always involves conducting field or remote research like interviews or mobile video diary studies (we like dscout & UserZoom). By seeing it ourselves, we recognize workarounds, physical artifacts, and motivations that are subconscious to our participants.

From the field: Look for the “wooden ruler”

While conducting observational research for a financial digital product, we conducted desk ride-alongs asking employees how they went about their day and how things got done. As you can imagine, the employees dove into several different applications going from one to another copying and pasting info across systems, showing all the normal challenges with complex financial software.

While walking through all the same flows and challenges with the final participant, we noticed an old wooden ruler on her desk. You know, the ones we had in elementary school. We made a note to ourselves to ask her about it at the end of the ride-along.

As we ended our conversation we asked the question: “Why the ruler?” Her colleagues chuckled and she blushed and said, “It’s for me to keep track of my check list”. She said, “We have to follow a very rigorous list of items to make sure everything is done in the right order”. She had a hand written checklist on her desk and she used the ruler to keep track of each item she was on, and would move it down the list as she completed tasks.

This observation would later become the key to streamlining the digital product. Something we captured in a few days, not months, would point us in a direction that would have huge impact on the product. This manual checklist was integrated into the flow of the digital product and allowed the company to remove errors and increase productivity of investments going through the system.

Without this observational research the team would have never seen or uncovered the hidden pain points that can completely change a digital product’s success.

“The market decides what works and what doesn’t, prototyping product moments allows us to speed up that process”