The fourth step in the 9II9 product lifecycle is Design. The design process in a media organization is often referred to as user experience (UX) design or product design. In some media companies, the user experience designers are embedded within the digital product team. At other times, the role can be an extension of an existing creative team that is responsible for the broader “creative” team which also manages the design of on-air graphics and visual communications. The most effective approach is for digital designers to be embedded with the product teams in order to foster a more collaborative and agile approach to developing and iterating on product ideas.

A useful tool for connecting a digital design resource with the traditional design and branding team is the style guide. A style guide is an agreed standard for how a media company’s brand is translated into digital platforms.

5 Product Design Considerations

Easy to Use vs Hard to Use Product

A Product Manager should always strive to create products that are simple, elegant and easy to use. So, what exactly do you mean by easy to use, and how can product managers design such products? In an easy to use product, the most often used features require the least number of steps or clicks to access. This type of product is optimized for the top tasks of the user and tucks away less frequently used features, and makes them progressively more discoverable over time. An easy to use product identifies the priority paths of users and clears the road to target content.

A hard to use product, on the other hand, gives visual priority to features that are rarely used. Such a product makes frequent use of features that are harder to learn and painful to use. This type of poor product design causes accidental use of lower frequency features.

The following incremental design approaches have been used across hundreds of products and represent multiple pathways leading up to a “strong” design that is both beautiful and functional.

Design Research

The design process for a new product or feature begins with a visual audit of current approaches in the market. The Product Manager works closely with a designer to understand design patterns and existing user behavior. Visual audits are an informal process and typically involves collecting screenshots of competitor’s products and understanding competing solutions to the same problem.

Content Map

Insights from a visual audit are combined with other research to inform a content strategy for the product. A content strategy identifies what information will be most relevant to make available across the primary screens or pages of a website or mobile app. A content map is a visual representation of how this information will be organized and presented to users. 

Content Grid

Content grids printed on A3 paper is an effective tool for getting editorial stakeholders to prioritize and decide on not only what information should be presented to users at each step of their journey through a website or app, but also to balance the content with the editorial output capacity based on available resources. This allows the product team to identify content-related design constraints early in the process and proceed with greater confidence as they execute the rest of the design deliverables. 

Schematics and Flows

A schematic or flow diagram is a tool that is best used for visualizing the way a user will move through various scenarios in a mobile app.  

Wireframes

Wireframes are the first visual interpretation of product requirements. The level of detail in a wireframe can vary greatly.

Terms such as low fidelity vs. high fidelity are often used when referring to the level of detail in a wireframe. In a media organization, some Product Managers find it good to pair a content map with high fidelity wireframes as a way to keep stakeholders focused on content and logic, and lock those aspects down as early as possible before presenting detailed wireframes. Without agreeing on the logic and components of a page or screen in advance, stakeholders could easily fall into the trap of treating wireframes as though they were design concepts, and the big picture content and product strategy gets lost in the details.

Design Concepts

Design concepts are the next level of detail when translating product requirements into visual artifacts. Design concepts build on the direction and approvals made in previous deliverables and is the final step in validating the overall design direction of the product. At this stage, a foundational design is approved and serves as the basis for all pages and screens going forward.

Interactive Prototypes

In modern product design, prototyping is an essential step in validating a design direction. The interactive nature of the digital products of today make it impossible to approve a product design based on looking at static images or printouts of screen designs. Developing a prototype allows a Product Manager to quickly get feedback and validate a product with internal and external stakeholders and address problems before a single line of code is written.

Design Explorations

Product Managers make a distinction between the problem space and the solution space. The problem space focuses on the user need or benefit that the product should address. The solution is a specific implementation that addresses a user need or product requirement. This separation allows for a product designer to produce multiple solutions to a problem. These solutions are sometimes presented as “design explorations” where the alternative approaches to a design are presented alongside a recommended direction. If the Product Manager feels that multiple directions are strong and need to be validated with users, then these explorations can be put through A/B testing variants in the product or through user testing of the variants with real people.

Design Sprints

Product Managers who follow an Agile Scrum methodology typically strive to have designs to be two sprints ahead of development. This is often difficult to achieve but should always be something to aspire to. The work of the design team in preparing assets for the upcoming sprints is called a “design sprint” because the designers are also working in one-week cycles to deliver assets for the upcoming development sprint.