Marketers need to learn the six fundamentals of user experience design to grow faster:
User Experience Design
Step 1: Understand the company’s core requirements and goals
Step 2: Create User Personas
Step 3: Research, Competitive Analysis Gathering Concepts, and Ideas
Step 4: Wireframing, Prototyping & Early User Testing
Step 5: UI Design, Prototyping & Additional User Testing
Step 6: Monitor Gather Client Feedback Make Adjustments and Improvements
Growth Strategy
There are two sides to structuring a company’s long-term growth strategy. Larger companies in the past have had their user acquisition efforts on the marketing side, and user engagement/retention on the product side.
More recently tech companies have been combining the two sides to create “growth teams” within their organizations. Effectively, these teams are comprised of people on both the marketing and product team working together to test new user experiences. Testing different tactics for user acquisition and user engagement/retention consistently equals long-term growth.
These growth teams are becoming more popular worldwide because they are proven to decrease friction between user acquisition (marketing) and user engagement/retention (product) Long story short, growth teams works.
Every Growth Team Mistake Affects Your Bottom Line
However, these powerful growth teams are a luxury for early stage startups given every mistake affects the bottom line directly. The simplest solution I’ve found is to teach the company’s marketers the basics user experience design. Enabling marketers to accomplish the first two to three steps of the process and communicating what they’ve done effectively with the product team, will show a drastic increase in testing.
Step 1:
Understand the company’s core requirements and goals
Have a kickoff meeting with the marketing and product team to discuss core goals.
For example, this would be a basic kickoff meeting for a website selling cars:
- Should users be changing the color of the car?
- Should users be viewing the car’s interior/exterior?
- Should users need to request a price quote?
Step 2:
Create user personas
Identify at least two different target users with at least five characteristics.
Example of a User Persona
Persona #1 is Mary
35 years old
Tech savvy
Active only on Facebook
Director of Customer Success
Making $120,000 per year.
Persona #2 is Mark
24 years old
Tech savvy
Active on Snap, IG, Reddit
Marketing Manager
Making $65,000 per year
Step 3:
Research, Competitive Analysis Gathering Concepts, and Ideas
Sit down, relax, and go through all the websites in the industry. Understand competitor's user experience and gather ideas for the product team. This is a vital step for marketers in learning to communicate more effectively with designers. Understanding why and when to use different design elements helps with both sides of growth (Marketing and Product).
"Study the past if you would define the future."
-Confucius
Step 4:
Wireframing, Prototyping & User testing
Critical Step
**After this step is the best time for marketers to pass the information they’ve gathered on to the designers and developers for prototyping.**
Everyone on the team (including developers) should help create basic lo-fidelity wireframes. This is both fun and important for everyone to better understand who is actually using the product that’s being built. Bring a bag of chips to spice things up for the developers.
Lo-fidelity wireframes are basic sketch’s that can be done on a whiteboard or paper. Using these lo-fidelity wire frames the team’s designer should work directly with the marketing team to develop hi-fidelity wireframes. This collaboration helps drastically if the marketing team has the information and research from steps one through three.
Hi-fidelity wireframes include more advanced design elements and are best done by professionals. Marketers can provide feedback and help with information but in my experience, leave this to the professional designer.
**If you are not familiar with LEAN UX, I suggest checking out the amazing designers on YouTube talking about their insights on early user testing and the importance it has on design.**
Step 5:
UI design, prototyping & user testing
When passing designs over to the development team marketers need to have everything clearly laid out. The more complex and chaotic the research and information is, the longer development and design will take.
When development is finished with the first prototype that is ready for user testing--
PLEASE --TEST, TEST, TEST!
Everyone in the company should test new user flows and designs.
Step 6:
Monitor, gather feedback and analytics
From the internal testing your team does with the prototype there should be enough feedback to test with actual users.
Enjoy testing faster!