With the rise of the digital economy, most companies have the business anchored in digital products. Regardless of platform, device or medium – customers are expecting the best possible experiences from companies and their digital products. This makes imperative that we place the user at the center of the design process to achieve a great customer experience. As the say goes “good design is good business” and the results are happy and loyal customers.
By understanding and caring for all stages of the product development process, we thrive to make products that solve a genuine problem, are efficient and easy to use and connect delightfully with the people using them.
Our process combines DESIGN THINKING to determine pain points, identify opportunities and come up with a series of a hypothesis that we can validate. LEAN UX/UI lets us test in an iterative way to define the best user experience, based on data and results.
Working closely with AGILE DEVELOPMENT partners we are able to include our process into theirs. This gives us the freedom and flexibility to work together with existing internal IT departments or any other software development company. For selected types of projects, we put our own software development team together and develop the project internally here at the agency.
“HAPPY CUSTOMERS ARE LOYAL CUSTOMERS. ITS BEEN PROVEN TIME AND TIME AGAIN. TO CREATE THE BEST EXPERIENCES, SOMETIMES WE HAVE TO TAKE THEIR SIDE OVER YOURS…”
DIGITAL PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT VALUE CHAIN
LEAN UX/UI
Based on traditional UX practices and inspired by Lean and Agile development methodologies, we use Lean UX to test our work faster and use the validated learning to design a better customer experience.
Just as Lean and Agile, we use an iterative approach that begins by understanding what problem needs to be solved and who is the intended user(s). We identify opportunities, research and observe to then begin sketching the first concepts.
Followed by series of rough prototypes we proceed to formulate a series of hypotheses that we can test with the identified personas, using a more elaborate prototype. The provided feedback is then incorporated in the next iteration.
A customer journey is mapped out to understand what parts of the overarching experience should be optimized. The customer journey map is constantly updated and we use it as a guide for the complete experience.
This process repeats until we believe we are ready to create an MVP and ship it to the first set of users.
MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT – MVP
The days of launching fully functional products to the market are long gone. Instead, we help our clients develop MVP or Minimum Viable Product for short. Included there are just those core features that allow the product to be used and tested with a subset of possible customers, such as early adopters. The purpose of it is to gather meaningful feedback and shape a better product vision.
An MVP helps to avoid building products that customers do not want. It allows the team to collect validated learning about customers with the least amount of effort. It is an iterative process of idea generation, prototyping, presentation, data collection, analysis and most importantly, validated learning. The process is iterated until a desirable product/market fit is obtained, this way only features that are necessary or wanted by the user can take priority into the implementation.
The purpose of the MVP is to get the product to early customers as soon as possible, but it can be also used to test a hypothesis with minimal resources, accelerate learning and even to be used as a base for other products. We test the MVP to understand how the product should be built. We anchor the development in the Lean process of BUILD > MEASURE > LEARN.
AGILE IMPLEMENTATION
For the development of digital products, we prefer working within an Agile Development Framework, with software support: JIRA (from Atlassian). It helps the team to be flexible and respond to unpredictability through incremental and iterative sprints.
We like SCRUM because of the emphasis on empirical feedback, team self-management, and the ability to build properly tested product increments within short iterations. However, we can adapt to any other Agile framework when developing applications. We usually work with our own in-house development teams, but we don’t exclude third party companies. Our developers, designers, and project managers are no strangers to Agile Development and how to integrate your processes within our framework.
Our technology expertise spans enterprise software and mobile applications, building on a deep understanding of the Java / JEE platform, open source stacks and mobility development tools.
Brains & Hearts is more than an agency. We are a partner.
Our clients lead highly complex industries and need an agency that understands what they do and, more importantly, what they require to succeed.
That’s why we like to listen even more than we like to talk. That’s why we’re able to combine an outsider’s critical and creative perspective with an insider’s expertise and experience.