While creating an excellent structure is important, communicating great UI UX design is also important, as even the best ideas will fail if they are not recognized by the team and stakeholders. That is why the finest UX designers think about understanding the business objectives before diving into a project.
The majority of UX designers are continually seeking to enhance their skills by studying more about User Experience or experimenting with new and innovative UX tools and technologies. This is a positive quality that may be a byproduct of the UX design process itself, which is heavily predicated on constant improvement, experimentation, and innovation.
However, one of the significant methods for broadening your understanding of UX design is also one of the most underappreciated. Novice UX designers often avoid attempting to grasp their clients' business objectives, which might complicate what are already unfamiliar concepts to them. Most skilled UX designers, on the other hand, aim to comprehend and absorb business objectives, ultimately making that effort a big part of their UX design process.
In this blog, we will discuss the importance of understanding your clients' business objectives and how it may improve not only your design thinking process but also your designs
Listening & Engaging with clients
Listening as an Action
Listening to our customers' comments needs active participation on our part as UX researchers. We engage in active listening to be ready to respond to the conversation at any point. As listeners, we need to repeat back, practically verbatim, anything that we have just heard. We need to engage in listening intently and attentively. To keep the conversation moving, we must ask questions quickly. An essential component of client satisfaction is communication skills.
We need to listen with a focused intent to make our customers feel heard and understood. Our customers should feel recognized to share anything and everything about their product and user experience with us freely.
Encouraging the client to participate actively in the design or research process has numerous invaluable benefits. First and foremost, the client frequently possesses information that can significantly contribute to the project. The briefings themselves, or even regular meetings, will often not allow you to go deeply enough into the issue to have the same understanding as professionals with years of experience in a certain industry. Engaging the stakeholders will also help you better understand and address their needs during the project. Discussing research questions and hypotheses with the client, or conducting design workshops, allows you to gain a better grasp of the project's objectives and expected outcomes.
Engage with clients that and it will guide you to better designing
A. Workshop to understand the client’s needs
B. Sharing knowledge
C. Stakeholders interviews
Fulfilling the Business Objectives should be the primary purpose of any commercial website. A designer absorbs this by actively engaging with the client.
What questions do you need to ask your clients?
A good customer is a valuable source of information that may help you save time and energy on a design project. It is very crucial to conduct user interviews and client interviews. You should leverage their knowledge early in a project to learn the difficulties and concerns that their users are most concerned about.
What does the product do and what do you want it to do?
What are your business objectives and how will they support your users?
Who is the audience?
How do they use the product / consume the service right now? (mobile / desktop / telephone / email / paper)
What do the users like/dislike about the product?
Are there any special needs of the user I should be aware of when designing? (areas of limited connectivity / less tech-savvy / language / desktop-only etc.)
Are there any special needs of the client I should be aware of when designing? (relationship with previous contractors / sensitive language / not easily available etc.)
What actions do users usually perform while using the product/service? (Usability)
How many users does this product have? Where would you like to take it? (Analytics — more users, more impressions, more page views, more conversions)
Are there areas where the users get lost right now? If I were to glance through customer support tickets, what would they be about?
What would be your elevator pitch for this product? (Client)
How would you think a user would describe this product? (User experience)
What have you already tried before and have worked / not worked for the company?
What user research has been done till now? Which techniques were used? Were they helpful? How?
What would an MVP look like?
Business-related:
What’s the scope of this project? What’s the budget like?
What are the client’s short-term and long-term goals and how much time do we have to deliver them?
What teams would we need to set up to achieve these goals?
Is there any domain-specific knowledge I should know/learn before starting on this?
What does User Experience mean for the client? How aware are they of the jargon in UX? (self-assess or ask team-member)
Is the client flexible/fastidious on the delivered solution? (self-assess or ask team-member)
For doing research, what are the policies I should be concerned about?
What techniques can I incorporate that would aid discovery (while keeping the policy in mind)?
Where in the design process are we? (Initial discovery, Strategy, Design, Testing)
What tools are the developers/other designers using?
How can the issues identified be prioritized to align with the client’s project roadmap?
What other contractor teams/client teams would we be working with? What do they do?
What has been done until now? By whom? What have you/they found from it?
What are the immediate next steps for us? Next meeting?
If you have an excellent project in mind and want to make sure that it provides the best user experience, you can also get in touch with us. We can assist you in creating customer-focused products by leveraging our UI UX experience.
Conclusion
Many UX designers' careers have advanced as a result of their willingness to learn about their client's business objectives and comprehend their long-term plans. Deciding to focus on the business not only provides you a new perspective on your designs but also on the entire process of creating them. Furthermore, UX designers may encounter some friction with their clients in specific scenarios. Being more sympathetic to them can also provide UX designers with insight into their decision-making processes. Considering business objectives is a key way for UX designers to broaden their skillset and effectively advance their careers.
In any case, regardless of whether your UX technique is simple or complex, the goal of any UX design process is the same - to create a fantastic product for your customers. As a result, use what works best for your project, discard the rest, and advance your UX design approach as your item advances. No one meets all of the standards for the UX design process.
Key Takeaways
A good design should not only be aesthetically good but it should also fall in line with the client or stakeholder's business needs.
Clients or stakeholders often have information gained through years of experience that the UX designer might not be aware of, so the active participation of the client or stakeholder can contribute greatly to the project.