Drew Bridewell walks through eight types of UX problems to hunt for in product flows: dead ends, unclear outcomes, unnecessary steps, inconsistencies, maintenance burden, accessibility gaps, wayfinding issues, and lack of scalability. He gives practical checks like testing tab order and screen reader support, and plans to apply this checklist to three mapped products next.
Hey, welcome back. So now we get to talk about how to identify some of those problems in the experience. And we will get to do this for each of the three products that we've mapped. But before we do that, these are like pre Facer tutorial videos, or not necessarily tutorial videos. They're just videos to help you kind of get your mind right about. Okay, when and where could I be expecting these things? So I got eight more for you right now. So we're on a hunt. So as a designer, we're on a hunt for problems, and then we're on the hunt for problems so we can identify and expose the opportunities. Because that's where the magic comes in. When you can expose the opportunity. That's when you can start brainstorming and ideating everything. If you just have a problem and you're just sitting with that problem, oh, my gosh, I have this problem. It doesn't turn into a solution. So we have to convert that problem into an opportunity and turn that opportunity into some hypotheses and. And then there's hypotheses into actual things that we can test and prototype so we can learn and so we can build and so we can learn to build and ship some cool stuff. All right, so what we're going to talk now is dead ends. We're on a hunt for dead ends. In your experience, when you're mapping things out and when you're going through that, we're going to be looking for, are there dead ends in the experience? Or if. If we mapped out a flow throughout that flow, when we get to the very end of it, is there a dead end? Does it have a next step? What could that next step be? If there isn't a next step, then that's a dead end. Right. So we don't want dead ends in our product. Another one is unclear outcomes. So if we're asking a user to do something but isn't really clear what they're going to get from it, that could be an unclear outcome. Or if we get them go through an experience, but they actually don't have anything at the end that feel like that's rewarding or gratifying or that's helping them move to the next step, that's a dead end and an unclear outcome. So we don't want that. So another one is unnecessary steps. So unnecessary steps would be like, okay, well, we have a workflow that has 10 steps. Cool. We have 10 steps in this workflow, and it looks amazing, but the problem is it doesn't need to be 10 steps. It could be five steps. So understanding why that decision was made beforehand, maybe there was a reason that we don't know. Maybe we could talk to the other designer about why they did that. But that's a clear thing that we would want to be mindful of and be able to go and approach that problem. Another thing is inconsistency. So, for example, like in your product workflow that you've mapped out, you realize that the navigation changes from each screen to screen or the buttons to continue to the next screen are at the bottom right and of half of the experience and at the bottom left for another half the experiences. So, like, find those inconsistencies. And it's not just the inconsistencies on a visual perspective. It's also from an interaction perspective, like the pages that we create and how we name things and the structure of how things are coming out. So we want to look for inconsistencies. And those are also could be opportunities. Now there's another one, which is the cost to run an experience. Or, like, how much it's costing us to have five or six additional steps. How much is it costing us to have this really sophisticated build, this product build, but it only is used like 2% of the year. Like, it's very, very limited being able to understand that. You know, you might need a data scientist, you might need to understand the data to do that. But that's still something we're on the hunt for, right? We want to make sure that we're optimizing and if in having a very efficient experience and efficient program. Another one is accessibility. So when you're looking at a product experience, like, do a quick check, make sure it's accessible, make sure it works in screen reader, make sure that you can tab through with your keyboard. Every single element on the page is there a tab index is like, what's going on there? So accessibility is something that you shouldn't take for granted. And you also, especially depending on where you work, you need to be mindful and thoughtful of this. All right, the next one, number seven, is way finding challenges. And when I say wayfinding challenges, I'm actually thinking about the path that we have. Like, is it up, down, up, down, up, down, or is it nice and smooth across? Like, we want to be thoughtful about when we're looking and hunting through some of the problems that we have before we start identifying, we want to be like, is this pleasant? Is this delightful? What does this experience feel like? So there could be a lot of navigational problems. And if you've worked on a legacy product experience before, you might have seen, you know, a ton of different navigational models, like navigation at the top, navigation on the sidebar. Things are hidden, things are showing at certain times, all those different elements, right, Are potential problems that we want to understand. Like, was that causing the experience to not work very well? Is that causing top of funnel issue for people not to sign up? Is the labeling clear? Whatever it could be? And then the last thing that I want to bring to your attention to identify, like on how you can identify problems is look at scalability. So scalability is in an experience. Is it able to evolve over a period of time? Did we design ourselves into a corner or is it very modular base where you can add things, you can take away things if the design is so custom and can't be changed at all, or else it will break down everything that's not very scalable. So what we want is a scalable solution that is something that you can grow with, that you could see, oh yeah, we could change this out a six months from now, a year from now. We could test different modules, we could definitely test different things in the experience. When we were designing LinkedIn, learning and Lynda.com, we were thinking modular base because there's so many different things that we wanted to explore around how the experience came to life for an online learner. And when you think about the page that makes up the course page, there's like 20 or so different features on Lynda.com experience and each of those components needed to be designed specifically from a responsive perspective. Mobile tablet, desktop TV, iOS, Android, all these extensible experiences. You want to make sure that your experience is scalable. So play that game, see how it would play across the board. Is your experience scalable? Does it need to be scalable? Is your audience across the board or is your audience just in this one place that's always going to use desktop computer and you don't need to focus right now on those other platforms. So all those things you need to think about, that is what I'm talking about for how you identify problems. We're going to do that in the map, but next we're going to talk about how to utilize these problems. So, right, we're going to spot problems, but how are we going to utilize them once we do this? And then we're going to jump into the mapping experiences for mapping makers, mapping the move, mapping the UX playbook, and we're going to kind of break down these three. These three areas for each of these products. So I'll see you in the next video.
