2 Responses

  1. Lynne Polischuik
    Lynne Polischuik at |

    Great post on an interesting topic, Lis. I had a conversation with a couple of founders recently who had a very limited budget but a very clear idea about what they needed to engage a UX practitioner for: They needed to increase paid sign ups and they wanted their payment/check out UI “optimized”.  On looking at their site, it became clear that the issue was not one of UI (their payment  process was clean and clear and simple) but rather one of expectations and engagement: Their value wasn’t being clearly articulated and they weren’t giving the user enough context to understand how they might actually engage with their product. The advice I gave to them was “Talk to your users.” Do some usability tests, but also some contextual inquiry. Talk to the people using your product–or the people you’d like to see using your product. Find out what their questions and pain points are. Find out what’s important to them and what they’d need to know before they’d sign on. Often even a very guerilla-style round of inquiry can yield some high value “low hanging fruit” in these situations–and can also lay the foundation for a more successful engagement with an actual UX practitioner. Once you have a sense of what you need to do to engage your users, bringing in a pro to help you do deeper inquiry or sort out some of those UI puzzles can be very valuable. And if a startup really is bootstrapping and doesn’t have budget to bring in a pro, simply talking to users will always go a long, long way towards making things work.

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    1. Lis Hubert
      Lis Hubert at |

      Completely agree! Great points… I find myself saying “talk to your users” a great deal as well. You are right… it is fool proof advice. Thanks Lynne!

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