UX Design Tip #1: Stakeholder Identification.
Context:
Management has promised the client to have their product ready within 6 months. The brief is communicated to the designers and a look of PTSD can clearly be seen coming over their faces. They know exactly what this means, 2 months to basically have Discovery, Validation, and Design ready by the time the Development phase kicks off.
In these kinds of situations, when the product design team has very short timelines — it can be easy to skip over certain activities that can be very valuable to the overall solution. One of those activities is Stakeholder Identification.
For this context, Stakeholder Identification simply put, is the process of understanding who the stakeholders involved in the project are, which business units they represent and whether the solution should include thier business processes.
If this sounds a little confusing, let me give you a fictional example to illustrate my point.
Use Case:
Let’s say your client is from the personal banking division of a bank, and they want to create a banking app. Let’s say that as part of the brief, the app must give users the ability to view their personal accounts and investment accounts alike. Lastly, let’s say as the design team you decide to skip stakeholder identification because you’re already working with the personal banking team closely. The requirements, business context, and users are coming from them — but what you probably missed in the brief is the “investment accounts” part. Now, let’s say it’s months later and the team is giving a product demo to the wider bank. Suddenly from nowhere, someone from the investments division team asks, “why are the investment accounts not displayed on the app” HORROR!!!
The problem here is because the design team was only focusing on one part of the solution, they completely missed the other which is visibility of investment accounts. During Discovery, the team did not consult with the investment team, and due to only engaging with the personal banking team, who also failed to pick up the risk — everyone became tunnel-visioned in the approach of creating the app.
Alternative:
What stakeholder identification allows us to do as designers, is to identify the relevant business units/teams/individuals we need to interview during the Discovery phase. If we understand that the app must have personal and investment accounts, we become aware that we may need to understand both personal & investment business processes, the systems they use, how complex will it be to integrate with those systems, and the types of customers they deal with, etc. This also helps us with the Validation phase, to test our prototypes with the right mix of internal and external users. Lastly, this ensures that the high-fidelity prototype can be as close to the ideal solution as possible — which represents both personal & investment accounts for its users.
Conclusion:
Skipping the process of identifying the relevant stakeholders for your project may seem like a time-saver initially, but missing an important stakeholder that is key to the overall solution may have you redoing months of work. Save yourself the unnecessary PSTD.
#YourFriendlyNeighbourhoodDesigner
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
