5 Steps to a User-Centered Design Your Shoppers Will Adore

It doesn’t matter how amazing your design skills. It doesn’t matter how phenomenal the products you’re selling. If you’re not designing for the actual people using the site, those same people aren’t going to care.

Web design has always been about the user. A site’s UX, whether eCommerce or not, is determined by how comfortably the interface fits into specific user preferences and how well the design anticipates what the user needs. However, both of these are highly variable — a site that’s absolutely perfect for one user may be annoying to another.

That’s why the heart of good UX, and eCommerce design in general, is knowing your customers. Your customers. These change from site to site, project to project, so designers can’t apply the same rules over and over. When it comes to understanding the people in your target market, each new design means starting over from scratch.

So we’ve compiled a simple but effective 5-step process to calibrating your entire eCommerce site around your customers.

1. Identify Your Market
2. Preliminary User Testing
3. Create Personas
4. Map Your User’s Journey
5. Test Again

WHAT IS PRACTICAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT?

At the core of practical project management is an ability for keeping things simple. Not getting bogged down in lengthy and unwieldy processes. It does not mean cutting corners. Good project management practice is still necessary; it is about keeping it lean and mean. This, and getting the basics right, will help you deliver a successful project.

BEGINNING
Following these basic principles will give your project a good start:
Keep it simple!
Identify the stakeholders
Ask who benefits?
Gain agreement to proceed
Deliver the plan
Follow the project idea through to use

REQUIREMENTS GATHERING
Take a piece of paper and draw a house. Now ask five people to each draw a house and compare it with the one you have drawn. Hey, presto, five houses different from yours. You may have townhouses, family houses, bungalows, maisonettes, the list goes on. All houses, but different in style, size, layout, decor and many other ways. The same applies to project requirements. Your view of the customer's needs could be different to that of your customer. Ensure you gather a concise, accurate and signed-off set of requirements before you start building.

COMMUNICATING
Does everyone in your team understand the project well enough to give an elevator speech? If the answer is no, create a one-page executive summary of the project that contains all of the essential information. The content of your executive summary might look something like this:
Project name - give it a name that brings it to life
Start and finish date - everyone needs a target
Project leader - the right person for the job
Objective - make it clear and concise
Business potential - agreement at every level
Ideas summary - outline of what it is
Major issues - what are the stumbling blocks
Timeline - hitting the milestones
Resources and materials - everyone likes to know up front
Budget - what do you need, who signs it off
Evaluation - measurement of the project and outcome
Ideas for improvement - sets you up for your next project
Circulate this summary to all of your stakeholders before you start the project.

KICKING OFF
By now, you've now got an agreed set of requirements and have communicated the project to everyone that needs to know. It's time to begin. Arrange a project kick-off meeting:
Invite attendees. Everyone needs to be there
Send an executive summary to everyone before the meeting
Involve end-users of the project output
Stay in control of the meeting
Request feedback to identify any problem areas
At the meeting, ask attendees to explain what the project is aiming to deliver and to describe their involvement. Also, ask what they need, what the potential problems are and how they are going to manage them.

CONTROLLING
Now the project is underway you must deliver the plan; communicate progress and manage resources. Here is where you earn your money.
Stick to the plan, examine it regularly and adjust
Provide regular updates and don't let the project slip
Put people on the spot
Get work done no matter what happens
Test, test and test again
Keep the end-users involved

DELIVERING
You've created something new; now people must use it.
Make sure it works!
Create a fanfare
Choose the right person to champion it
Don't forget the training
Follow-up by having pre-arranged meetings in place to ensure everything is working as planned.

PROBLEM AREAS
Watch out for these commonplace project management gotchas:
Creating a 50-page plan you'll never carry out. Heed this advice from General George S. Patton, A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.
Filing project assets incorrectly and as a consequence wasting time looking for them
Allowing people to involve themselves in areas where they have little or no knowledge. Their involvement wastes time and money. Avoid!
Creating bottlenecks that slow your project down. Remove them!

REMINDERS
These are some of the important items you need to bear in mind before, during and after project delivery:
Create the right environment so people will take ownership of their part of the project
Baseline your project plan so you can see progress over time
Evaluate project progress continually asking, "How are we doing?"
Add some slack to your project plan because some things will take longer than you think
Create simple and easy to understand project documentation
Test using independent people
Check with the customer after delivery to make sure everything is working
Look for improvement opportunities
Check delivery of the expected benefits is on track
Document lessons learned from your projects
Kill failing projects quickly
Celebrate if the project hits its schedule
Have fun!

FINAL THOUGHT
Keep your project processes simple. Hefty project processes can be a disabler to killing projects. As English businessman, Sir John Harvey-Jones recognised, There are times when you have to kill your favourite children. He was talking about businesses, but the same applies to projects.
A successful project comes with great leadership, not lengthy and unwieldy project management processes, so keep it simple!

What is UX research?

UX research encompasses a variety of investigative methods used to add context and insight to the design process. Unlike other sub-fields of UX, research did not develop out of some other field or fields. It merely translated from other forms of research. In other words, UX practitioners have borrowed many techniques from academics, scientists, market researchers, and others. However, there are still types of research that are fairly unique to the UX world.

The main goal of design research is to inform the design process from the perspective of the end user. It is research that prevents us from designing for one user: ourselves. It’s fairly well accepted that the purpose of UX or user-centered design is to design with the end-user in mind, and it’s research that tells us who that person is, in what context they’ll use this product or service, and what they need from us.

With that in mind, research has two parts: gathering data, and synthesizing that data in order to improve usability. At the start of the project, design research is focused on learning about project requirements from stakeholders, and learning about the needs and goals of the end users. Researchers will conduct interviews, collect surveys, observe prospects or current users, and review existing literature, data, or analytics. Then, iteratively throughout the design process, the research focus shifts to usability and sentiment. Researchers may conduct usability tests or A/B tests, interview users about the process, and generally test assumptions that will improve the designs.

We can also divide UX research methods into two camps: quantitative and qualitative.

• Quantitative research is any research that can be measured numerically. It answers questions such as “how many people clicked here” or “what percentage of users are able to find the call to action?” It’s valuable in understanding statistical likelihoods and what is happening on a site or in an app.
• Qualitative research is sometimes called “soft” research. It helps us understand why people do the things they do, and often takes the form of interviews or conversations. Common questions include “why didn’t people see the call to action” and “what else did people notice on the page?”

Though researchers may specialize in specific types of interviews or tests, most are capable of conducting a wide variety of techniques. All researchers collect the valuable information that allows us to design in an informed, contextual, user-centered manner.