Many design teams are caught in the crossroads between user needs and client requirements during product design—the failure to fit into the sweet spot between the two impacts both quality & designer credibility. Exclusively suiting client needs in your design can result in a product that is simply cost-centric; an effective design aims to improve the target user experience as well.

This blog will supply you with some key recommendations to find the balance between the client and user needs to create a winning product design.

We know how important it is to gather meaningful feedback from our users to drive design decisions. Interviewing and engaging users is an art. It’s a skill that requires practice, planning, and preparation.

Albert Einstein once said:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

It is shocking how often enterprise clients ask designers for a “next-generation user experience” without articulating beyond that.

Debates around measuring user experience or modernizing designs often leave UX designers trapped in a subjective spiral, struggling to prove their work’s worth. These arguments lead to inevitable back and forth with clients as we aim to hit a moving target. However, if we fail to define a next-gen user experience’s qualities, how will we ever know if our design missions are truly successful?

Capturing and implementing personas is a ritual in most UX design lifecycles. User personas are useful to visualize your design’s consumers while incorporating the UX design philosophies in your business.

According to experience Dynamics, “A persona is a vivid, narrative description of a fictitious person who represents a segment of your user population. It is based on primary research that uncovers the real attitudes, goals, and behaviors of the users it represents.”

For many, the three-stacked, neat-bar Hamburger menu icon is synonymous with responsiveness and modularity in web and mobile standalone/companion apps.

Most UX designers are beginning to think that hiding features off-screen behind a nondescript icon, side menu, or navigation drawer isn’t a great mobile design choice. In fact, it impedes engagement and visibility, in addition to cramming a ton of functionality into an app.

Product Managers often understand the value of user research and regular testing in theory but may face practical challenges in implementing it.

Even as user research’s value becomes more and more evident, there are still skeptical individuals and organizations that feel like they know their users. Sometimes they align their thoughts to the Henry Ford quote, “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Given the overarching function of user experience research (UXR) in bringing end-users’ needs to design conversations, a research method based on direct observation of current workflows offers a powerful way of understanding those needs. Contextual inquiry is such a method; it involves direct observations of and conversations about workflows with subject matter experts or other workers who perform the work that a product is designed to improve.

White space, grids, information architecture, principles, and purpose are all good UX design staples. An often-overlooked tool of UX design, however, is that of the subconscious. The human brain has a fascinating ability to observe an image and create a ‘whole’ more significant than the sum of its parts. It is wired to see structure, logic, and patterns that don’t exist but are perceived by the onlooker. That’s why we see children (and adults) often finding patterns and entities in things like abstract designs, trees, nature, etc.

While traditional approaches to user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) research prioritize being present in the same location as the respondent, there are situations where in-person research is not feasible, such as during a global pandemic.  Ethnography is a powerful, in-depth research method to capture rich insights about the human experience, including experience as a customer or tech user.  Ethnographers traditionally collect data in person, often over extended periods.

While some user experience research (UXR) problems can be solved using one research method, others benefit from mixed-methods.