As a UX and web design company, Webcreator believes that business objectives should be accomplished by creating simple ways to improve the user experience.
The idea is to focus on your business objectives and work backwards to determine strategies that will accomplish them.
step #1 Define your objectives
The first step in the process is to define your objective and validate it. Your objective should relate to the part of your customer lifecycle that has the most potential to push your business forward. For example, you may want to increase user acquisition for your sales team or reduce user churn to increase average lifetime value.
Either way, start with your best guess based on your current performance and user feedback. Once you land on your objective, you can use it to identify areas of friction to pinpoint clear opportunities for improvement.
step #2 research frictions
The first step in uncovering your users’ friction is to analyze your quantitative data. Dig into web analytics, funnel analytics, event tracking and heat mapping tools to gain data-driven insights into what’s holding your users back.
Next, use these insights to drive your qualitative research. Start by having conversations with users, both those who did and did not experience friction. Simple questions, such as, “What drove your purchase decision?” or “What held you back from upgrading?” should provide interesting, helpful insights.
Research will validate your objective and identify where you should focus your efforts to achieve better results.
step #3 Strategy: Create, set & Prioritize Experiments
In the strategy phase of objective-based web design, your research fuels ideas on how to reduce friction and create a better experience for your users. You can achieve this through brainstorming sessions with the whole team, including stakeholders, designers, strategists, developers and other roles, such as marketers, product owners, etc.
To prioritize your best ideas, you must assign a value to each experiment. On a 1-10 scale, score both your estimated effort (time and/or money) and potential impact (on the objective) of each experiment. To create a value, just divide the potential impact by the estimated effort.
The final step of strategy is selecting what experiments to implement in the current iteration of objective-based web design. Sort your queue by value. Then, select the experiments to implement that will make the largest impact within your time and budget constraints.
Step #4 Implementation
The implementation phase should reflect your own website design process, whether you have an in-house team or an external design partner.
For small experiments on existing products, we may prototype using existing style guides and go live as fast as possible. Make sure to annotate Google Analytics, add new events or funnels, and prep qualitative questions to assess the new web experience.
summary
Objective-Based Design is a simple, effective way to accomplish your business objectives by improving the user’s experience.
It allows you to work with your customers, employees, stakeholders and partners to gain clarity on what is causing friction and how to design a better user experience. Using OBD forces you to design digital solutions, impacting your objectives and benefit your business.
Objective-Based Design helps you make creative web decisions to achieve business objectives.
