Getting to How
When we have a task to improve an existing product it is best to start with figuring out what it does already.
I hope by now you have an idea for what project you’d like to be working on for your portfolio. You also should have a solid problem definition to work with.
Like I said before it is extremely important to have one. Here is what Jesse James Garrett, the author of The Elements of User Experience, has to say about it:
“Together, product objectives and user needs form the strategy plane, the foundation for every decision in our process as we design the user experience. Yet, amazingly, many user experience projects do not begin with a clear, explicit understanding of the underlying strategy. The key word here is explicit. The more clearly we can articulate exactly what we want, and exactly what others want from us, the more precisely we can adjust our choices to meet these goals.
Jesse James Garrett in The Elements of User Experience (page 36-37)
So please, please make sure you have a working problem definition before you move on.
Now it’s time to get to the actual design part of the process. You might be thinking, “Finally! What software should I use? How can I make those fancy looking animations that I see everywhere on Dribbble and Instagram?”
I hate to break it to you, but we are not there yet. There are few more steps that we need to take before we are ready to produce final designs that you can proudly share with others.
First, we need to decide how we are going to solve the problem on a high-level.
Let’s look at Spotify again.
User journey map
Our problem definition was “Improve song suggestions feature of Spotify”. How are we going to do that? Fancy animations definitely won’t do the trick! In fact, this particular problem might not require any UI changes at all, but let’s not jump ahead of ourselves.
When we have a task to improve an existing product it is best to start with figuring out what it already does, and figure out what works and what doesn’t.
One way to do it would be to reproduce the user’s journey through the app. This process can be represented as a customer (or user) journey map. I encourage you to look it up, and try to make one for your project. It is one of the things you can include in your case study.
But I got ahead of myself. In order to construct the user journey map you need to decide who is the user taking the journey. This is where personas come in.
Personas are fictional characters that represent a particular segment of users. Defining personas is a big subject. It is tricky to do it right.
Personas are beyond the scope of this newsletter. Let me know if you are interested in this topic, and I will address it in one way or the other in my future emails/posts.I’d say for your first project you don’t need personas. Just use yourself as the hero of the journey.
Let’s come back to improving song suggestions in Spotify, and draw a user journey map for the user who doesn’t like songs suggested by the app.
The idea is to go through the journey step by step just as a real user would do it, and carefully note steps taken as well as any questions, or thoughts, any expression of frustration, delight, etc. (I’ve put those in brackets in the example below).
The journey might look something like this:
I have a song in my head (Let me find it in Spotify)
I open the app, and search for the artist or album (I don’t remember the name of the song, but do remember the album)
The search suggestions bring the exact album I was looking for (That’s cool. Probably Spotify remembers what I searched or played before) 👍
I scan the song list (I think I found the right song) 👍
I play it (It is the one! I am happy) 😎
Song is done playing (I am in the mood to hear more songs like that. How do I do it?) 🤔
I look around the interface (Looking for something like More Like This or Explore) 🤔
I don’t see anything in the sidebar (Hm…) 🤔
I go to the main page and see Made for you (That looks promising!) 😀
I open the playlist (I don’t recognize most of the songs or artists there)
I play some (I don’t really like them) 😔
What do I do next? 🤔
I open Google and start looking for “songs similar to…” there…
I continue listening on Youtube 😎
You can see that some steps might not be strictly relevant to the problem at hand. You can also see that some steps already suggest a solution (e.g. adding an Explore link to the sidebar). In this case it would solve the problem of discovering the suggested songs playlist, but if the content of the playlist is not satisfactory merely reducing friction in finding it won’t address the real problem.
To really solve the problem I’d have to think of the ways to make better song suggestions.
Thinking out loud here:
We could prompt the user to provide feedback on the playlist, or something like that…
We could use user’s song and search history to improve suggestions…
We could find ways to use AI to improve suggestions…
It might get fairly technical, and I might not be able to offer any real solutions without consulting with Spotify engineers to see what kind of data they have and what is possible to use… Remember this is not a real project. It is OK to assume things, and propose solutions that might not be viable or feasible to implement in a real product.
Also note that some solutions involve modifying UI while others don’t.
I am trying to make a point here.
As a UX designer you have to be comfortable with thinking beyond the UI. It might be that the solution to the problem will call for minimal changes to the UI, or no changes at all.
For your homework, I’d like you to create a user journey map for your project. You can do one for yourself as a hero, or ask someone to be a hero and observe them using the app to accomplish the task, and document steps they take.
The example I gave above was about improving an existing app. You can apply the same process to a brand new product too. In this case, instead of mapping a journey through the existing product, you will have to look at how the problem is being solved now. Chances are this journey will involve a number of products, or no products at all. But the same line of thinking applies. You have to observe and document the journey and capture questions, thoughts and emotions associated with each step. Your goal is to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Let me know how it goes for you!