Based on the process as described by Laura Klein in UX For Lean Startups, Amazon link here.
1 Rephrase business requirements as problems from the users’ perspective
2 Get stakeholder validation of the new phrasings, including org folks who are closest to the problem’s source
3 Design the first test and define specific metrics to measure its success
4 Write some design stories, which break down the overall problem into manageable, measurable steps
5 Meet with the team and discuss
- Decide on a clear user problem and the reason we are solving it
- Give everyone a couple of minutes to write down their ideas in A SENTENCE OR TWO
- Have people read their answers and put them on a whiteboard. Don’t go into great detail about any of the ideas
- Group ideas in ways that make sense–which metric will be affected, ease of implementation, customer problem being solved etc
- Do ask folks if they feel strongly about any solution, but no voting–this was a generation exercise
- Create a graph with X Y axes labeled Expected Return and Expected Cost and put the ideas on it
- Don’t go over 15 min total
6. Attempt to invalidate the design at this point. Failing now is still really cheap. For example, add a button to initiate a new proposed function on the site which delivers a “This feature isn’t quite ready” response. If nobody clicks the button now, chances are nobody will click it after all our development time and money is spent!
7 Sketch some approaches
8 Meet with the team and choose two or three options to test
9 Test with 5 users. The point of this test is to find out whether they can understand what the product is and how they would start to use it for their most important tasks. This isn’t a usability test of the design but of the concept!
10 Create an interactive prototype of the winner(s)
11 Time for the usability test–especially important if there are several steps required to complete a task since there are multiple places for users to get lost. Test with 5 folks
