Why are we doing this?

Using UX to evaluate whether a new project is founded on a good idea.

Tons of ideas (of varying quality!) find a home in today’s tech landscape. Everyone wants their’s to succeed, but most pursue development quite blindly. In order to have a chance to make the user experience design of your idea strong enough to get out there and evolve, make sure to start by figuring out the following three things:

1. Understand the origins of your idea.

It’s important to first contextualize where an idea has come from. Has a strong case been built around this idea? Find out where the idea falls on the spectrum between subjective wants and objective needs of the longterm vision. This will tell you a lot about how much work you need to do before you actually start building.

2. Ask for the perspective of as many internal stakeholders as possible.

It’s natural for the different roles within a project to become siloed off from the others. Whether you have a couple of others involved or many different departments, it’s important to intentionally create time to check in and hear the different perspectives. With an entire scope of opinions, you’ll be better equipped to discern the best path to a sound user experience according to all internal parties.

3. Get up-to-date with customer feedback.

The most important guidance you can receive is from the users. So tapping into their perspective is the most essential thing to do before putting your own strategy into a new idea. The ultimate goldmine is to review past support responses from the existing project. If that’s not accessible, you can interview target users and surface pain points of related, competitor solutions.

And what if the idea doesn’t hold up to this?

If after digging around a bit, you find that the initial idea is disconnected from the feedback you’ve collected, don’t continue with it as-is! Letting an irrelevant idea run rampant can poison its future direction. Use the new information you have to pivot to a project that is worthy of your investment.