A step-by-step guide to the Design Process for Startups.

This will help you to understand the design process and improve the quality of work for startups.

Here You will learn:

Before understanding what is design? let us know about

Why Design is Important for Startups?

The design will help in achieving business goals by achieving user goals.

Good Design will really improve user experience, adoption, and engagement so that users will reuse the application which leads to an increase in retention rate. So if the retention rate is increased then the revenue for the company will automatically increase.

Good design will increase brand identity and brand reputation.

Good design really makes visitors to paying customers.

So what is bad design?

We all experience this at a point in time when we use some apps and websites with unclear navigation and lengthy and complex checkout process, clutter screens which make us leave the site or uninstall the applications.

So Nowadays many startups are investing in designing and it can bring both long and short-term benefits to a business.

How to design a mobile application or web application for startups?

Every business wants to make their product/service that should be tailored to user needs and deliver a unique experience to an end-user along with achieving the business goals.

To design the mobile and web application, many startups followed a methodology called product design sprint.

This Methodology or Process has 5 steps:

Research | Concept | Prototype | Testing & validation | Visual design

Research, Concept, Prototype, Testing & Validation — — UX Design

Visual Design — — UI Design

Let’s understand step by step product design sprints

Research:

Research means gaining a deeper understanding or Insights about users, markets, competitors, and metrics by doing interviews or surveys or asking own self.

They are two types of research:

Quantitative research: is expressed in numbers and graphs.

Qualitative research: is expressed in words. It is used to understand concepts, thoughts, or experiences.

Research plays an important role in starting a new business or startup / Adding a new feature/service to an existing product. Here we have to do

• User Research
• Competition Analysis
• Business & Market Research
• Metrics / KPI (Key performance indicators)

If your startup is focusing on a space where some startups are already entered then gather useful information from studies that have already been done This means instead of starting from scratch it might save you a lot of time and effort.

User Research:

User research is all about understanding

• User need, goals and motivations,
• Problems and obstacles they are facing in the sector
• how user lives or behavior & attitudes

User research can be done in many ways:

In-depth interview (IDI): is a structured interview with potential users. Where we meet users directly or face to face. And It is also called Ethnographic Research where we have to go to the field or user environment and understand the users.

User Observation: User Observation is performed by a UX researcher or UX Designers who watches the customer going through everyday activities. The idea is to compare what is said versus what is done. There are two types of user observations

Controlled: A controlled observation is performed in a lab or pre-arranged setup. It gives user researchers a good idea of what customers actually do in differing situations.

Naturalistic: Naturalistic observation is performed “in the wild” without any pre-arranged setup. The naturalistic approach is considered more reliable and the preferred method of observing people.

Shadowing: Shadowing is an active research methodology with the UX researcher joining the customer to perform activities. It is done in the user’s natural environment and provides deeper insights into their motivations and behaviors.

Online Survey: But sometimes, it is not possible due to large distances, time, and budget restrictions. It is better to meet with users via online surveys.

Question types:

Leading vs Objective questions:

Q) What do you like about using Zomato?

A) This will only get you the answers about what’s good about Zomato, not the whole picture.

Q) What’s your experience with Zomato?

A) The users will actually share their thoughts on any positive and negative experiences they might have regarding Zomato.

Closed vs open questions:

Closed questions have options to answer

Q) Do you use Flipkart?

A) This can be answered by just Yes/No and thus can give you a very short answer.

Open Questions don’t have options or limit

Q) What’s your experience with Flipkart?

A) Here we ask the users to share all their experiences regarding Flipkart.

Here is an example of user research done for an online grocery startup

So after getting a lot of information from the users We have to create users personas that may be fictional or real-life persons

User personas include:

• User Details (like name, gender, location, age, hobbies, occupation)
• User Short Bio
• User Daily Activities
• Life Goals
• Behaviors
• Frustrations

Many companies will print these profiles and stick them around so that it makes it easy to think and make decisions.

For Example:

What happens when user —-A

Does --X & Y

In scenario — — Z

Here is an example of User personas of an online grocery startup

Competition Analysis:

While doing a startup we have to learn from the success and mistakes of competitors

If you have competitors then try out their product / Understand or find out good or bad things their users saying about that product you can find them in the play store and app store reviews.

Find out if there were other companies/players in the past trying to do the same thing or solving the same problem.

If yes why they shut down their startup possibly try to interact with them and get more insights. It is very important to examine each competitor with the same criteria to get a reliable analysis.

Types of Competitors

• Direct competitors — those who run the business on the same market, solve the same problems, offer the same functionality, share the client base or user base.
• Indirect competitors — those who run the business on different markets but show a small impact on business.

Here are some of the Question that should keep in mind while doing competitors analysis

• Who are the competitors? Names, short information about them, their locations, websites, etc.
• What are the competitors’ missions (if they exist)?
• How are they different?
• How are they similar?
• How is your brand unique and how does it differ from the competition? Why should people choose your brand and use your app as customers?
• What are the messaging, product/service offerings, etc., that set the competitors apart?
• What are the products the competitors offer (with pricing)?
• What are the competitor’s strengths? What are the competitors good at?
• What are the competitors’ weaknesses? Where do they fall short?
• Is there anything that your competitors cannot do but you could that would make the idea successful?

Here is an example template for Competitors analysis:

Marketing Research:

Market research is about to understand

• Size of the market
• Market shares
• How people attitude towards a product.
• Market environment.
• Business models or revenue models
• Cost Structure & Pricing

Many startups fail because the business model they decide is not matching with the market they are trying to enter. And the business model should be matched to the market they are trying to enter.

Here is an example for Competitors Analysis and Market research

Metrics / KPI:

In this stage, we have to find out What are the metrics or key performance indicators that matter to our business?

Here are some of the metrics with real-time examples:

After doing the research we get a lot of ideas and solutions and divide them into

• Musthave (High Priority)
• Nice to have features (Less Priority)

The research will help to make successful products that are highly tailored to user's needs and provide the ultimate user experience which is called human-centered design.

Concept:

It’s time to give a product idea a shape

All the ideas & solutions are in the head and we need to start assembling them and create an overall concept and user Flows/Roadmaps/Journeys on how users are interacting with a product or service

Here is an example of How User Flow/Journey/Roadmap looks like:

Paper Prototype:

It’s the quickest and obviously, the cheapest method

Create a paper prototype of how users navigate or how users interact with a product or service and showing all the features that you want to include in the app.

A paper prototype is a quick and easy way to create. and reduce/saves a lot of time and energy. It’s all about sketching the interface of what things should be on-screen in each step like a button or text field or dropdown or icon or search box or cards.

Here is an example of How a Paper Prototype looks like:

Testing & Validation:

This phase is called the moment of truth because we are testing and validating the product in real life and getting a deeper understanding of what works and doesn’t work for users before investing any money in visual designing and developing the product.

This was done with a selected group of users, stakeholders, Technical experts, or domain experts (to understand the capabilities or limitations).

We ask them to perform or to spend a couple of hours going through the product and doing a set of tasks, just like users would do. so that we can evaluate if crucial actions are easy to perform and if the used terms are understandable. And how they can navigate.

Does the design meet business goals?

Does the design meet the user/customer needs?

Does the design support a road map of future improvements?

Does the design is easy to use

Does any element cause confusion?

Here we calculate the below things like:

• Success rate — the percentage of users who complete a goal within your product or reach a stage you want them to reach,
• Error rate — the number of mistakes a user makes when completing a task,
• Clicks to completion — the number of clicks the user performs before completing a task,
• Drop or stop rate — the percentage of users who stop the task before it is completed.
• Content Audit: Here we analyze & evaluate the content that the text and language that we are using are relevant to our target audience.

After getting all the reviews from the people we divide all of them into three:

• minor — it doesn’t disturb the user experience
• major — must be addressed, which impacts business goals
• critical — severe issues Must be addressed in the first place.

If some changes need to be made then again do research, concept, paper prototype, testing & validation. We have to do this process until we get a clear picture of the idea and product.

After validating the paper prototype we finally convert them into High Fidelity wireframes.

Visual Design:

Let’s understand the basic structure and atomic design methodology by Brad Frost

In the visual design step, we research which:

• Fonts,
• Color,
• Icons,
• Buttons,
• Illustrations,
• Images,
• Animations we have to use

We have to decide all these based on our targeted users and targeted sector.

Here are some of the examples of mobile applications to understand how they use different colors, fonts, icons, and buttons based on their targeted users and sector.

They are two different types of wireframes

• Low-Fidelity Wireframes or Grayscale Wireframes
• High Fidelity Wireframes

Low-Fidelity Wireframes:

It’s completely designed with the shades of grey color

here we can only validate or review the shapes, sizes, alignments, position spacing, Icons, Hierarchy, Height, and Width, UX writings.

UX writing: UX writing is about writing all possible text displayed to users. Every description, email, notification, label, error message, link, button, text, etc.

As Nelson Mandela once said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

Here is an example of low fidelity wireframes:

High-Fidelity Wireframes:

Here we add colors to the design and finally validate the overall design of the application.

Here are some of the best tools in the market used to create prototypes are

Sketch, Figma, Adobe XD

Finally, Product Design Sprint is a powerful way and it allows companies to reduce the risk of failure in new or existing product development, and to condense a month's worth of work into just a few days.

Although it is possible to conduct your own product design sprint, You may find it beneficial to bring in the experience of experts

I have spent years doing product design sprints. If you need any help with your new project or existing one to the next level just let me know. I’m ready to help with your creative requirements.

Do share your feedback with me at guruprakash43@gmail.com or tag me on Twitter at twitter.com/GuruAdimulam

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