How long should the product design process take?
Hey IH!
This is my first post, but I've been listening to the podcast and reading forum discussions for several months. I'm currently in the process of building my first ever project. It's a web application that isn't huge, but still has some complexity to it.
I think a good user experience is critically important, so I've been taking the design process very seriously. I've spent a couple weeks doing interface sketches, and I'm getting close to being done. It just feels like it's taking a lot longer than it should. Although I am being forced to think through a lot of options and make a lot of critical design decisions, I feel like I should be to the point of building a functional prototype by now.
Just out of curiosity, how long do you guys typically spend designing? This includes research, writing scenarios, sketching, and wireframing.
- Miles
I'd say it definitely depends on the idea.
My strategy for product design is to explicitly define the fundamental steps needed for a user to achieve their goal, and then build the ui up around those steps.
If it's a complicated workflow it could take weeks to really define everything and build an interface for it, if it's simple it could take a few hours.
I think the key here is to maintain balance between usable and feature rich -- aka do not overthink it, and ship as early as possible. I've certainly spent many hours overthinking ux flows, only to have them never see the light of day, or be deemed not-useful by users.
Thanks for the advice. I'll try to define the most important UI flows and make sure my product functions well around those. I think I've been swaying towards the feature rich side as I continue to design, and simplification would be my best bet right now.
You can check the works and ask for a timing here https://fuselabcreative.com/our-projects-categories/dashboard-interface-web-apps/ They're real professional in it and will help you for sure.
I think you've already taken too long. It's a small/personal/simple project.
Don't feel like you need to bite off everything. Focus on the core problem UX. Tertiary areas like settings, sign-in, pass reset, etc, can wait.
If you understand the problem, then it's easier to know when you arrived, or at least get far enough to gather validation, whether through usability or with agile coding methodology.
Using design patterns from frameworks like Bootstrap, Foundation, etc., you get standards, consistency, and fast implementation. Templates (eg. https://wrapbootstrap.com) also helps start quickly. The reason I'm suggesting boiler plate stuff is that the raw materials are there for you to use to solve your customer/product problems. The faster you can craft an experience to tryout, the sooner you will see if it solves the problem. This works for both internal use and external customers.
You'll always have many small use cases, states, etc, so focus the problem and macro patterns. Ensure your IA is logical, UI is flexible (to accommodate more content/actions), and quickly sketch out the flow so you know how information progress. Then code, tryout, repeat.
Good luck!
I probably have already taken much too long, I just get really wrapped up in the idea of building out a full, impressive product instead of focusing on several small, important tasks and searching for user feedback. Thanks for your advice!
Unless you have paying customers using your app today giving you feedback indicating the design needs work, you're wasting time. Sorry to be blunt, but that's the bottom line. Without having customer feedback, you have no way of knowing whether what you're doing is worth the time you're spending on it.
I have made this mistake myself numerous times. Nitpicking over design decisions which, in the end, turned out to be completely irrelevant to the customer.
Point is, you don't know whether you have a good user experience until you can collect data from real users indicating so. I would launch with the most simple, plain interface that gets the job done and take it from there.
I personally tend to spend as little time as possible on design work, as we simply tend to overthink and overdo it. In my experience the users don't care nearly as much as we'd like to think they do.
Good luck launching the app!
I appreciate the bluntness! I'm sure it'll be much easier to improve the design once I have real users trying it out. Thanks for the advice.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Lesson 1 is so true. I keep telling myself it'll probably be done in a month or two but it never really ends!