Funder Solutions For: Elsevier
Research
Prototyping
Product Strategy
Presentations & Stakeholder management
Accessibility
DISCOVERY
Developing a new product meant exploring the target audience and the existing market (competitors, alternative solutions). Developing and following a script I could follow when meeting development partners meant we could later map our potential users according to size of organisations, fields they specialise in, and analyse the interviews in a way that would allow us to see what common use cases, pain points, other products surface and to define personas.
Looking into what other products already exist in that realm through websites, webinars, tutorials and testimonials help us focus our value proposition, while products that would come up in the interviews help us map what potential users already "agree" to pay for and further research their value for them.
Share-back sessions were held internally within our organisation to communicate our findings from meetings with our target audience to the different stakeholders.
USER JOURNEYS
While the research is on-going, getting more precise and focused with each session, sketching of user flows begins along with determining data availability and quality. The main use of those flow charts and data mappings are used to help align the understanding of the stakeholders around the intentions for this product.
Product owners and Tech leads get a first glimpse of what the product might shape up to be. They can start gather thoughts around the scope of the project, use the visual material produced to communicate onwards in their own groups and build trust that there is in fact value to be provided.
DEVELOPMENT AND ITERATIONS
After prioritising and refining the stories in the backlog, development starts. All the while we keep going back to development partners and potential users to get all the more specific feedback on our work, throughout all stages of it - assumptions, wireframes and prototypes and future plans.
Planning the future version of the proposed product allows us to validate our current direction and to reverse engineer phases of releases. What we need to do now that would build towards a more accomplished version.
A lot of work goes into making sure the developers and QA have everything they need. Every scenario and interaction are fully solved, fleshed out and represented in the stories. Full availability and attention to the team are required to make this stage run quickly and with as little bottle necks as possible.
DESIGN
The design of the new product relies heavily on the existing company guidelines + modernising the look & feel to be more airy, clean and flat. Emphasising points of interaction and calls to action. This approach is also being implemented in the development of another sister-product, by another team for Institutions.
