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How designers use objective-driven UX design to solve business and customer problems.
“If only I moved that column 5 pixels to the left.. then that would have made our design a success!” — No designer ever.
If we can all agree that the above statement is a bit nonsensical, then why does it come up so frequently? How do we get teams and organizations to stop focusing on the minutiae and, instead, focus on something bigger?
When a non-designer thinks of design, what typically comes to mind? I imagine most people conjure up images of elegant UI’s, beautiful animations, or thousands of post-it notes plastered around a room. If your organization views design this way, then you will continue to receive aesthetic and superficial feedback — becoming that truly dreaded term ‘pixel pusher’.
When you look deeper into design, the actual designs, themselves, are just permutations behind the overall goal of design: problem solving. Design is about solving user problems and accelerating business objectives. So, to formally define objective-driven UX design, it is about solving user problems in the context of a business objective.
Let’s be clear: a problem is not “we need more revenue”. Rather, a problem is: our customers are confused during our app’s onboarding experience, which lowers our conversion rate and NPS. Notice how we appended two objective and measurable metrics to our problem statement: conversion rate and NPS.
Therefore, our design objectives become about driving measurable goals. This has a few notable benefits:
Implementing Objective-Driven UX Design