Embedding User Experience in the Product Development Lifecycle

User needs influence features and functions that support the ways users would want to apply a product within their own contexts. By user, I mean someone who actually uses a product in his normal routine rather than a manager or other stakeholder who makes the decision to buy the product, but does not actually use it. By far, eliciting user needs is where UX professionals can offer the most value during the requirements definition phase. There are several ways in which UX professionals can determine user needs, including the following:

• focus groups that let a company hear what users want in their own words
• contextual inquiries that study how users accomplish tasks within their real work environments and actual workflows
• usability testing of a company’s own products or competitive products to understand the opportunities for enhancing the user experience
• inspection of a company’s own products or competitive products to uncover weaknesses that detract from the user experience
• product support records that point to aspects of a company’s current products that are difficult to use
• user experience literature that describes best practices and research-based principles of user-centered design
  
  

Designing and Validating Products

The design and validation phase is where UX professionals do much of the heavy lifting of creating usable products. During this phase, they produce design artifacts that inform the work of other designers and developers:

• User profiles describe different types of users and their attributes, which a design needs to accommodate.
• Personas describe users in personal ways, so a product team can visualize the users as they create a product for them.
• Scenarios describe the user experience around specific tasks and goals.
• Use cases describe how a system and its users interact, often exploring failure conditions and alternative paths to achieving goals.
• Wireframes show how to construct a user interface.
• Specifications define the user interactions and behaviors for a product.
• Prototypes can add interactivity and functionality to wireframes or specifications. They enable the validation of a design by users through usability testing.
• Usability testing gives early feedback about a prototype’s performance and acceptance.
  
  

Development and Testing

When an organization’s level of usability maturity is low, the development and testing phase is where most UX and user assistance professionals first become actively involved in the product development process. Usability experts inspect and test the usability of a product’s design, and user assistance developers document tasks and procedures. Although these are useful activities, they are reactive, so their impact is limited by the reality that developers are already committed to key design decisions. Any UX team that gets shut out of the requirements definition phase and, more important, the design and validation phase experiences a lot of frustration. They can see the potential for creating a much better user experience, but have been limited to damage control and lipstick-on-a-pig interventions.

Deployment and Support

Like the front end of the product development process, the tail end does not get as much attention as it deserves from User Experience. By the time, a company has deployed a product, the focus of most UX teams has moved on to other projects. But this phase provides the best opportunity to see a product at work in its natural environment and start making plans for truly user-centered improvements and enhancements. User researchers can conduct rich contextual inquiries to see how users really use a product for their own purposes, independent of preconceptions and the constraints usability testing often imposes. Customer support records can also be a rich source of information that points to potential areas for improvement in a user interface, as well as the features that would benefit from user assistance content in future releases.

Conclusion

UX professionals should educate their product development teams about where best to employ user experience activities and artifacts. In this column, I’ve defined a simple product development lifecycle model and given concrete examples of the kinds of impacts UX professionals can make during each phase. Every development organization is unique, and yours might have opportunities I have not described here. The important thing is to look at your current process and identify where UX professionals could make a positive difference—then insert yourself there!