New year, new job and new User eXperience challenges.
Yesterday was my last day at Ricardo AG. In the last couple of years my colleagues and I worked to design the user experience for the responsive version of ricardo.ch and autoricardo.ch. My role was leading this project in terms of UX. Was a great chance and a massive collection of challenges.
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What were the main topics that we faced during this project?
What keeps users engaged with your products?
When you design for a e-commerce (it does not matter if is B2B, B2C etc.) platform you need to take care about a long list of needs. You have to merge business needs, user needs and stakeholders needs. Understanding the user behaviors is a “must have” and a daily task for the User eXperience guy (or girl). It is clear enough that is not possible to control the user journey anymore. In the e-commerce environment never the less. Understing the user needs and behaviors can open a new vision to design products. At the same time iterate testing phase is crucial. It’s a focal point to boost during the product design process. It’s important to deliver fast to be able to test in a qualitative and quantitative way. Do not stop with a single test and single evaluation but iterate them and try different solutions.
How to evangelize the user experience design process?
I hopped in and off several design team. At Ricardo was different because was easy for me to get involved in the product design process since the beginning. What was challenging was the set-up of the UX process itself. As UX designer I was involved in the planning and in the execution phase. This was quite a tough task for me because I had to take care about a lot of dependencies between product, management and IT requests. I learned how to prioritize topics, how to manage parallel tasks and how to say no to the people. This is for me the real meaning of “UX evangelization” in a company. It’s a kind of internal/intimate UX between the design team and the stakeholders.
What scares stakeholders to push new features/products?
I learned that the “go live” fear is something that can slow the process and can create many issues. What I find out is that you can easly decrease (or delete) this fear asking users what they really want or what they really need. The feedback that you will collect can give you a new way to think and to design your product and your strategy. The user journey related to the main fetures, for instance, is something that has to be checked and steadly evaluated every time we are thinking about a new feature. The way how the user access to the features can be very different, ask about behaviors and routines can improve the UI performances. Checking all these topics can help the team to think in the right way how to design the next feature.
How to manage lack of time/resources?
These two topics are overwhelming. I learned that much time you spend to think, draw, design, test and re-do everything in loops less chance of errors you will have when the product will be live. Time and effort are important, this is the reason why a correct approach and a realistic vision are important to deliver good products. I learned the importance to say no with a bunch of real reasons and real justifications. I learned to appreciate the value of the MVP (Minimum Valuable Product) approach. I find out that this approach can be a good way to evaluate ideas, concepts and solutions.
What I will bring with me in the next experience:
Learnings from the people I worked with
The most important part of my experience is related to the humans. I learned to interact with people coming from different cultures and countries. I want to be focused on increasing these skills. It is so fascinating and engaging to interact with different behaviors and backgrounds.
Environment and attitude
Work hard and play hard viagra kaufen online. This quote is a masterpiece for my next experience. Sharing tough and funny moments with the fellas you work with is important. It is a great way to better know each other. Increasing the team spirit can be productive in terms of fresh ideas and new solutions out of the box.
Processes and flows
Mobile first and User Centered Design are essential part my work since I started at Ricardo. I truly believe that this is the best combo to improve the UX for e-commerce products. Expecially in Switzerland because the Swiss market is full of opportunities for platforms like ricardo.ch. The user base own the latest version of the most powerful devices. They browse the web with one of the best connection available in Europe and they are used to buy (and sell) goods and services on the internet. The UX overall has less technical constraints, but of course, the user expectations are very high and complex.
The importance of the data
Reading and understanding analytics data it is another important task for a UX. Increasing the know how about tools, metrics and goals data based can boost the UX process in terms of performances and user satisfaction. I want to improve my attitude to use data to paint out personas, scenarios and behaviors. Managing these topics with data support can be very profitable for the project. Using data is a good start to have the big picture in your mind. This can be a great leverage when you have to share the UX topics with stakeholders.
I wish all the best to this company. I strongly believe that it will remain the best market place in Switzerland. I am sure that people who work in ricardo will always ensure its customers a simple and exciting e-commerce experience.
Live long and prosper!