A remarkable customer experience is critical to the sustained growth of any business. A positive customer experience promotes loyalty and helps you retain customers.
Customers instinctively compare each new experience, positive or otherwise, with their previous ones and judge it accordingly.

As a new-comer to the family of Prismic Reflections, I got to learn a lot from my experience on the product that I was working on. The task was to re-imagine the platform for personalised property management services for the Homeowner Association (HOA) based out of the United States. I worked on User Research, Strategy, Idealization & Prototyping for web and mobile applications .

During the process, I observed and learned how collaborative design is important and what value it can add in the overall design process and ultimately to the business.

Involving client and his team in the design process

The client usually has knowledge that can contribute to the project a lot – since they are the masters of their game. The briefs themselves or even regular meetings, will not allow us to explore the subject deep enough to have the same knowledge as people with years of experience in a given field.
Encouraging the client to be actively engaged in the design or research process has many invaluable benefits.
The client-base can be further classified in 4 ways-

Top Level Management/C Suit-
Top management have the visibility and clarity of the big picture of the business. Their views and inputs to align the design objectives with business strategic objectives at an early stage is critical for the success of any design project.

Product Owners, Managers & Marketing team-
These people own the product internally. They develop a very deep understanding about the product, its vision, core functions, workflows, technology etc. They define. Decide & control the feature rollout time, testing, backlogs etc along with empathy they have developed for users. Product managers are responsible for different success metrics of the product, internally in the client’s team.

Dev Ops-
Addressing the concerns, constraints on the technical ground in the early stage becomes important for designers if they want to reduce the time in the development process. Technical feasibility of design solutions is something we can expect from the Development team.

End Users / Product Users-
Involving actual users during the design process, may not be at every point but at completion of critical workflows like on-boarding, payment etc definitely saves time at an early stage if designers validate them before it goes to production. Having real users for early stage testing (with wireframes or prototypes), at least for every critical roll-out adds significant value to the outcome.

Working together with the client’s team & real users (or set of people that matches the persona of real users) enables the design team to deepen their empathy around critical success factors (CSF) & validate the product at various stages early on.

Pros & Cons of Collaborative Design

Pros of Collaborative Design-

• It helps building solid business empathy & its critical impact areas
• It brings business team and design team on same page to agree upon one common vision
• Saves cost by early addressing different constraints to avoid future back and forth.
• Design is iterative process, however iteration cycles become much fast in collaborative design
• It brings diversity & sense on inclusion in the team while working together
• Involving users early in the stage, helps in building deep empathy & early validation of design ideas & solutions
• It helps in bringing personalisation in experience design at a very early stage.

Synthesizing abstract ideas into concrete design implications is not an easy task. In collaborative design one must be open to receiving feedback and constructive criticism.

Reducing effort is a huge component of improving UI/UX design. People don’t want to have to hunt for information or click on buttons that lead to dead links. They will also choose interfaces that enable them to accomplish tasks in the shortest possible time, and abandon brands that don’t meet these efficiency and ease-of-use standards. It all comes down to these straight points as mentioned below.

There are some factors that may impact on the overall process due to collaboration, as mentioned below.

Cons of Collaborative Design-

• There are chances teams may often lose the track as different people are involved with different perspectives
• It becomes a little time consuming exercise as compared to a non collaborative approach.
• It might surface if there is any mis-management in the inter department which may result in conflict.
• Some clients/designers assume they have a leadership role.
• Collaborative design requires very experienced & professional in charge to handle and drive the project in a seamless manner. Such resources come with their own high fees.

Conclusion

Involving the client, their team & users in the design and research process is always valuable. The client has much more knowledge about his business, customers and product, so it is worth using this knowledge as much as we can. Consistent feedback from users & stakeholders can play a pivotal role. Client’s engagement also allows us to make sure that we understand business needs and constraints well, and that we deliver real value for him.

In the end, however we conceptualize it, a customer that is engaged in a project is less likely to be critical of decisions made about direction and design and more likely to feel some ownership in the outcome. A customer who is part of the process is less likely to criticize than one who remains distant as an observer. In my experience, projects with high customer involvement always end smoothly with a sense of mutual accomplishment and that is exactly the process I have tried to follow.

I would love to hear about your experiences & thoughts about collaborative design. If you have any project ideas or would like to understand our process in detail, you can reach out to us here.

Main Author:
Vishakha Agrawal
UX-UI Designer at Prismic Reflections®

Article Contributors
Swarup K. Bagul
Co-Founder of Prismic Reflections®

Article Contributors
Vishal Jadhav
Co-Founder of Prismic Reflections®

Designing experiences for products and platforms is a rewarding experience. It feels good when months of hard work turns into a product that benefits people and businesses. It feels even great when these efforts are recognized by respected people and committees around us.

We at Prismic Reflections® are honored to receive special mention from India’s Best Design Awards for designing the experience of MoneyGuru – a Mutual Fund Investment Platform.

India’s Best Design Studio Awards is the first and most respected recognition for Design Studios and Projects for their professional work, business practices and transparency, initiated by POOL Magazine.

MoneyGuru was indeed a very special project for us. With a number of mutual fund investment platforms already in the market, the challenge was to design a unique, intuitive and seamless experience that empowers smart savers with market insights & simplifies overall mutual fund investment experience. How the mobile application is crafted to tackle different challenges, how solutions are ideated, can be viewed here in the case study.

We would like to thank the team at Moneyguru for giving us the opportunity to contribute our expertise in Strategy, UX & UI designing for Android, iOS mobile applications as well as their product website.

It was a true collaboration, where our designers worked closely with the client, right from developing the concept to launching the product through several iterations and final testing. Here’s what Harsh, Managing Director MoneyGuru has to say about us:

We extend our gratitude to POOL Magazine for recognizing our efforts. This will definitely inspire our designers at Prismic Reflections® to set new creative benchmarks in the coming future.

In the previous article, we talked about the commonly used design terms in “Research and Ideation” category. You can check the first article of this series here if you have missed out.

Here are the next set of design terms, those you will find useful to keep handy when you study foundation as well as deeper in this area.

User-Centered Design

This iterative design process aims at understanding the user perspective (their thoughts, beliefs, motivations, etc.) for creating highly accessible and usable products for them. Wide variety of design and research techniques are used in this procedure. Also, it involves a mix and match of generative ideas (rigorous brainstorming sessions) and investigative tools ( surveys and interviews ) for a deep understanding of the needs of the users.

Human-Computer Interaction

Human-computer interaction is a systematic study which aims at improvising the overall experience for smooth communication between humans and computers.

Interaction between human and computer should be as friendly as conversations between two humans. Specialized design process, emotional design, and human psychology are its three major integral parts.
Ultimate goals of Human Computer-Interaction are :

• Understanding the ways of improving user experience
• Understanding user behavior in order to determine as to how people can use technology

UX Design

User Experience includes everything that contributes to physical & mental experiences of the user while using the product or service. It may include the user’s journey, information flow, content text, videos, images, graphics, interfaces, colors, interactions with the products/services. It is a step-by-step process which aims at creating meaningful & engaging products & platforms for the end users. User experience design follows a multidisciplinary approach that covers the entire process from branding, analysis, research, design, interaction, accessibility, usability, functional development & frequent upgradation.
We have discussed more in detail about UX Design, elements of UX design & different career options in our article which you can read here.

Lean UX

As an Agile development in software development, Lean UX is about creating the design in rapid way, mostly depending on assumptions, to get maximum feedback as early as possible. Unlike traditional or comprehensive UX Design process, Lean UX eliminates in depth activities to arrive at something tangible quick

Some of the major benefits of using this technique are :

• Cost Effectiveness: Don’t waste your resources in working on a product which isn’t needed in the market. You can easily test your hypothesis by validating every decision.
• Save your precious time: Due to its collaborative nature, getting rapid and quick solutions becomes easier.
• User-centric: Focus is on the user and their requirements at every stage of the designing process.

Responsive Design

It is a holistic approach which makes use of cascading style sheets, flexible layouts, and images to enhance user experience across all devices. Its ultimate purpose is to refine the appearance of the website according to the orientation and the screen size of the device which the user is using.
This technology is adept at adapting automatically according to user preferences and needs. This helps to get rid of a different design for every new gadget in the market.

Interaction Design

The process of interaction design takes into account like how users will interact and use the product or particular interface or even a particular piece of content. Five major dimensions in interaction design include words, visual representations, time, physical objects and behavior.

Wireframe

Wireframe refers to designing a website at a very nascent stage. A wireframe is used for laying out content and functionality on a page which takes into account the preferences and requirements of the users. Wireframes are used in the initial design process to set the basic structure of a page before visual design can be added. There are two phases in wireframing activity Low Fidelity & High Fidelity Wireframing.

Low Fidelity Wireframes

Low Fidelity Wireframes are an easy and quick way to translate high-level design concepts into testable artifacts. The aspects of visual designing for the final product include basic visual hierarchy, shapes of elements and more. Typically they are in black white (or any two contrast colors)

High Fidelity Wireframes

High Fidelity Wireframes are more effective than low fidelity wireframes as they reveal what content & functions will go where and how, using guidelines of layout as well. Apart from that, high fidelity wireframes are refined and consist of various elements like images, graphics, color scheme, logo and more. They are created using digital tools and hence the process is more time consuming.

Prototype

A prototype is basically a primitive version of something that is iterated upon until it is a final product. It is a simple & easy version of the product or website. It helps to understand the simple workings of a product and its interaction with the user on creation of the final product. Prototype can have static interface (series) or in the form of clickable simulations of interfaces

UI (User Interface) Design

UI Design is a process of creating an interface between human (user), software and machine/hardware. This interface is actually a virtual (sometimes physical) layer where interaction between user, software and hardware takes place.

UI Design is a phase when designer converts the wireframe into final visual design with appropriate fonts, colors, graphics and, icons by focusing more on visual design aesthetics. UI design must follow some guidelines for usability like font sizes, usage of color shades, content hierarchy, consistency, accessibility guideline, etc.

Use Cases

Use Case is a brief of how the system will respond to the user against the action the user is performing. Use cases take into account all the possibilities where different options or tasks with a combination of other possible options or tasks in the application/website. Use Cases are to be considered and recorded while planning & designing an application. Apart from that, use cases also provides a list of comprehensive goals as to how the system should behave in certain processes.

Affordance

Affordances are nothing but visual clues in a design. They help the users to understand your UI efficiently and effectively. Improving the clarity of interface is vital to getting more visibility from the users.
For e.g. a door handle can indicate whether it can afford to push or pull.

Service Blueprints

Service blueprints are simple and clear diagrammatic representation of the services of a business as a whole. Their end goal is to understand the pain points of the customers and discover the internal shortcomings in their workings so as to improvise their working process. It aims at visualizing the organizational processes to optimize how a business can aim at delivering a great user experience.

Navigation Design

Navigation design is a discipline to design the ways for helping users to navigate through the platform (website or app or product or even physical space)
Navigation design plays an important role in creating a full-proof system that allows the users to interact and use the products in the most effective way. It is how your user can get from point A to point B or point C in an easy and hassle-free way.

Some of the advantages of a good navigation design are enhanced credibility and visibility of product, increased conversions due to more traffic, enhanced user experience and more.

MVP

Minimum Viable Product is the process of developing or designing a product with the least but its core features so that it can be quickly deployed for testing the market viability and acceptance amongst product’s potential customers.

Several benefits of carrying out MVP Process are understanding your customer preferences and needs, getting insights into whether the product is needed by users or not and checking the viability in the market by launching the product with minimal features.

I hope you enjoyed reading. Please feel free to share your comments and thought or any other terms if you wish to include in this list. Soon we will come up with the next part of this article with a few more interesting terms.