Brief: Uncover the mystery of how designers, product managers, customers and stakeholders can design deliverables faster.
How do designers, PMs, customers and stakeholders design and produce results efficiently?
In the process of being a product designer, I had to work on projects of different strengths (Android, iOS, user dashboards, management dashboards, email templates, etc.) and different fields (health, finance, cryptocurrency, data, travel, etc.) ), the size of the team is different (me + co-founder, 5+ or 50+), even if there are so many differences between them, but one thing in common is that we all face this problem: how to communicate the requirements to the product designer? This will affect the resolution of the problem.
Look at this situation
Suppose, you just had a long conversation with a customer. During the phone call, he listed a lot of requirements for big applications (such as Uber in a laundry shop. What should I do next? How to achieve These requirements? How can we get the clarity of design from the oral presentation?)
All you need is: demand expression.
Demand induction is the act of sorting out the demand from the demand, and demand expression is the act of transforming the demand into a usable form.
Most projects that designers work on can usually be divided into new designs (functional or blank products) or redesigns (existing features or products). Although the project type, timetable, team size, etc. all affect the acquisition and final performance of requirements, these three methods are always better than oral requirements, BA documents or some project contracts:
User story
User stories are designed to save all requirements in a consistent format. They are easy to write, easy to read, and easy to evaluate. A good user story is to clearly outline the specific functional requirements in the product.
The general template is:
As a "user/administrator", I want to be able to perform this "action" in order to achieve this "result".
Example:
- As a user of the restaurant app, I want to view the menu so that I can visually see what dishes are available.
- As a user of the restaurant app, I want to view the bills of all items in order so that I can know how much it will cost me to order these dishes.
- As a user of the restaurant app, I want to be able to select the "Pay Now" option when viewing the bill in order to pay the bill.
User flow
The user flow is used to determine the interaction with the product in more detail. This is a useful technique to ensure that the entire development team knows the functions and processes of the product. Although this is a UX guideline for designers, it can still be designed as desired.
User processes provide a clearer and more intuitive way to interpret requirements as design deliverables, rather than just relying on language descriptions.
For this, there is indeed no universally recognized template. But they can be created with almost any design tool, because they are just a bunch of shapes, text and arrows. I recommend Balsamiq, Paper Sketch, drawing on board, etc.
The following is an example of user flow.
User stream: Oluwatobi Akindunjoye
General tips that can be used:
- Rectangles can represent actions, views or content nodes.
- The page stack is represented by three overlapping rectangles. Use a page stack to illustrate the similar content of multiple pages. Think about product detail pages, news items, or blog posts.
- The horizontal arrows tell us which pages are connected, or how we can jump from one flow to another.
- Vertical arrows can indicate a series of processes that must be completed in sequence, such as a 3-step form
- Dotted lines can be used to indicate that the connection is based on specific conditions.
Wireframe
The wireframe is the basic visual representation of the product. They focus on the basic functions and end user tasks to be supported. They are like architectural blueprints. They can help you consider where to place buttons, text fields, and images. They can show the direction of travel and avoid some confusion to a certain extent. By the way, wireframes also have some problems, for example, it doesn't involve fonts, images or colors to be used at all.
It is okay to do some design, but you should not design and develop solutions too early, because wireframes can also help you perform user tests and verify incorrect design assumptions.
There are many different tools for developing wireframes, and I personally use Balsamiq. You can also use figures and paper to describe them, and later scan them and import them into your computer. Either way, whether it is a paper version or a digital version, as long as it is convenient for communication and discussion.
Example of wireframe:
Wireframe Yu Oluwatobi Akindunjoye
in conclusion
The demand does not have to come exclusively from the user, and there are many ways to derive additional demand. For example, you can interview end users to see how they work, what they want, and what they like.
Although there are many ways to derive requirements, how to express these requirements in a form so that we can start a progressive design dialogue has always been a challenge. Requirement expression is especially important for designers, because: **Problems can only be solved within the scope of what is understood as a problem. **Expressing needs in these forms can help the team have a healthier discussion to solve expected problems.
This article is translated from Probing requirements for design clarity by Moknife, and has been authorized by the author.