A Process for Scalable Design

Using scalable design to your advantage 

What is Scalable Design?

MVPs (minimum viable product) are built to get proof of concept or by quickly putting something in the market and gathering feedback. Often times MVPs are designed to solve core user and business needs. Unfortunately, many MVPs are designed and launched without future use cases in mind. This leads to a design and overall user experience that can't scale with an evolving product. As designers, we need to have a clear understanding of the immediate user needs and business requirements. We need to able to scope the entire vision of the product from the beginning. 

Designers need to contemplate the possibility for business and product changes, right from the beginning, and that must be reflected in their Design proposals - this is a very specific mindset that designers struggle with sometimes.- André Oliveira

Designing a scalable MVP will help you maintain consistent user flows, create user familiarity, and avoid constant updates to UX patterns. Implementing scalable design is most valuable when your product is new and you have control over the end to end design. This enables the design to scale with the product as it changes and evolves. Scoping the product vision and establishing UX flows, in the beginning, will help you create scalable design patterns. 

Here is my process:

a simple thought process that is meant to be used as a guideline as you design an MVP

clearly defining and validating the vision of the product

Know Your Role Understand your role on the project so that you will know how to identify information and get buy-in from key stakeholders. It is vital to involve key stakeholders early and often during the discovery phase so you can keep their priorities in mind. Involving stakeholders early will also help you create buy-in for UX from other departments.

Exploratory Research opens the possibilities of understanding and creating hypotheses for the problem at hand. Does the problem exist? Is there potential to bring value to the business? Who are we solving the problem for? All of these questions can be answered through user and market research.

JTBD (jobs to be done) What job is your user needing to fulfill? Based on the results from your research, identify and write JTBD statements. This will help you and your team understand the core user needs as you go into scoping and designing the MVP. 

Exploratory research is useful when you're challenged with solving problems that you know little about because you, or your team, don't face those same problems in your own lives.- Sam Enoka Product Designer at Canva

decide what features you can scale down what might be needed as you grow

Requirements After you have gathered enough data to validate your hypothesis it's time to start planning. Stakeholders should still be heavily involved while you scope the MVP. Requirements for development, business, and UX all play a key role in deciding deadlines, roadmap direction, features and acceptance criteria.

Acceptance Criteria should be detailed and stored in a single sharable location so they are accessible for every member of your team.

UX Roadmap Use data from your research and UX requirements to create a high-level UX roadmap. The roadmap will serve as a point of reference that gives your team a line of sight. A roadmap that is too detailed enables over-design which wastes time, money, and leads to revisions later on. If the roadmap is not detailed enough you can miss steps that needed to accomplish certain goals, which in turn can waterfall into stakeholder's wavering in support and other departments misunderstanding requirements for the project.

Understand and document as much as possible, what use cases effect each other both directly and indirectly. Gather the constraints, time, and requirements from both UX and the business. As this is being conceptualized, start to prioritize so you can set realistic time frames for each step. Gather feedback from your team and update. This is basically the plan for the plan.- George Garcia Senior UX designer at Overstock.com

User Flows Don't worry about making the UI look perfect at this point. Start with user flows and low-fidelity wireframes. By establishing UX patterns first, your UI can easily evolve as the features, technology capabilities and use cases change.

Validation Gather feedback from potential users and focus on how they interact with the overall flow. Can users get from point A to point B with a minimal amount of resistance despite the lack of immersive UI? Ask key stakeholders to validate your flows from a business perspective. Do your flows prioritize user action required by the business?

Wireframes After you have validated your user flows, move to high-fidelity designs. If you are constricted on time at this point you should be okay to push to production as long as the high-fidelity designs do not change the user flows.

Rapid Feedback By now you should have already established that your designs meet the user's needs and business requirements. This final round of feedback is just validating the UI.

When designers are creating new interface layouts from scratch, all design elements should be conceived in a way they can be dynamic, flexible and extendable. - André Oliveira Founder & CEO of Pixelmatters

Documentation Document your decision-making process so that stakeholders and future designers will be able to have full context as to why you landed on your final designs. Confluence, Asana, Dropbox Paper are all great tools for this.

Review Challenge new data with data from your original exploratory research. How does this new data compare to data from discovery phase?

Iterate New products are never perfect and there are always things that can be overlooked like new technology, user requests, law & universal access implementation. When needing to change UX patterns, consider minor feature updates or UI improvements. Maintaining navigation patterns is a must to implement scalable design.

Do use the prioritization matrix to make the most impact in relation to the urgency of the feature. You are the one who is going to take the final decision on what should be there in the minimum viable product and what you will keep during the launch of your MMP. - Swarnendu De Founder Under 30s & Technical Director of Innofied

Real-Word Samples

Snapchat vs Instagram

Notice how much the UX flows changed in Snapchat over a one year period. The UI has improved over time but it has been at the cost of inconsistent UX flows. Snapchat's ever-changing UX flows have created usability issues.  Over a 5 year period, the only noticeable changes on Instagram were several minor UI tweaks & improvements. What Instagram did that Snapchat was unable to do was update functionality, UI patterns, and branding around the established UX flows. Instagram did not sacrifice UX flows for prettier UI. 

You need to identify the actions that the users need to take in order to reach the end of the story and achieve the goal. - Swarnendu De

You are all set to design an MVP! Thanks for reading, If you enjoyed reading this piece, please click on the like button below! For feedback and questions please reply below or find me on Twitter @codyjscott.