The Horse and the Cart
I’m an idea person. Ideas are constantly falling out of my head and jumping off of my tongue. Just listen to me and I’ll tell you about the next Uber... it’s not as complicated as you think!
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I’m an idea person. Ideas are constantly falling out of my head and jumping off of my tongue. Just listen to me and I’ll tell you about the next Uber... it’s not as complicated as you think!
OK, maybe all my ideas aren’t that good, but we love idea people here at Salsita. We’ve been fortunate to breathe life into many of these new ideas over the years.
People or organizations regularly come to us with a great idea, believing that they have it all worked out and just need people to implement it. While that may be the case, even the best ideas can use a little help and perspective from experts who have been there before. This is why we have been beefing up our UX team so that we can do more to help these ideas succeed in the long-run. This means providing week-long UX workshops that dig into the details of the problem we’re solving and analyze potential solutions to make sure that the project starts off on the right foot.
SO WHAT DOES OUR UX TEAM DO?
We’re glad you asked! Ultimately a UX team helps you save time and money by identifying and solving usability issues upfront. Here’s how we do that: first, we sit down and figure out the problem that we’re trying to solve and why we are trying to solve it. Who are we helping and how? Many great ideas are a bit fuzzy around the edges. After we have the problem and motivation well established, we speak to experts in the field and look at existing ideas that can inspire our product team as we come up with ideas and solutions.
Even these first two steps alone are invaluable to a project and provide huge amounts of context for the team and the client throughout the rest of the project. It’s important for our UX experts to be the key points of contact in the project when we have questions about functionality and usability.
After the first couple of days exploring solutions, pain points, and ideas, we synthesize our conclusions into a cohesive solution that we can storyboard with our clients. This way everyone can agree on the chosen solution and see exactly how it’s going to work. Often times during this phase the client will tell us, “This is so much better than what I originally had in mind!” We do this so that we can agree on an end-to-end solution and give it to our UI designers to begin prototyping.
Once we have these functional prototypes, we present those to the client and begin user testing. This yields further insights into how people will approach and use the solution that we envision. This is one of the most revealing parts of the process, and many times it leads back to the drawing board. That doesn’t mean that the product isn’t good or ready, it just means that a few people did not understand every aspect of how to use your product. Once we have that hard data recorded and have pinpointed anything that isn’t so clear to our testers, we can go back to the client and iterate until we come up with a satisfying solution.
The end of the week normally wraps up with a review as well as setting goals for the project going forward. This investment of time and money is sometimes very difficult for idea people and companies to justify upfront. Most just want to start coding their solution right away. However, the more measured approach inevitably ends up saving money and leads to a far superior result.