10 Product Design (UX/UI) terms businesses should know (Part 2)

Read Part 1: 10 Product Design (UX/UI) terms businesses should know (Part 1)

User Insights, User Personas, and User Journey Map - 3 factors to help understand users

If nobody uses the product, it does not bring any value, no matter how it is beautiful. And to avoid digital products falling into this scenario, User Insights, User Personas and User Journey Map are essential factors that businesses must consider.

User Insights are deep understandings of users, not only about behavior, needs, and goals but also about thoughts and feelings. Unlike data (facts without context) or information (data placed in a specific context with unknown value), User Insights are valuable understandings gained from the data and information digging process to help the product team empathize with users.

User Personas describe a person who represents the typical set of users who will use the product. User personas usually include background, personality, behavior, habit, and needs. It is the basis for building User Journey Map.

User Journey Map is a design and analysis tool to understand the user experience when using digital products. Through the User Journey Map, the product team will get the following:
- An overview of all touch points when users interact with digital products
- Capture the goals, needs, and problems that users are facing at each touchpoint
- Ensure consistency and seamless user experience across all touchpoints
- Detect which touchpoints have problems or can be improved to provide appropriate solutions.

In the process of UX Design, there won't be a solution for everyone. Each user segment will have a User Insights, a User Personas, and a User Journey Map and need a design solution created only for them.

One of the common pitfalls when implementing UX Design is going into the rut of available solutions on the market (Best Practice) or from the personal experience of the product designer, not from User Insight.

Therefore, User Personas and User Journey Map will be practical tools to help product designers eliminate personal prejudices to put themselves in the user's shoes, thereby digging deep and understanding the deep needs or hidden difficulties they are facing (User Insights).

Read more: User Empathy (Part 1): the factor to create a "gravitational pull" for digital products

Prototype, MVP, and Impactful Product - 3 versions on the journey to build digital products

Building a digital product is a long-term process that, if deviated, will consume a lot of time and resources. To limit this risk, instead of starting to build a complete digital product from the beginning, businesses can break it down into three versions with increasing levels of perfection:

Prototype is built to test - review - revising a product before officially launching. Prototypes are usually implemented in the Earliest Testable stage - the earliest stage where a business wants to test its assumptions and ideas as cheaply as possible.

MVP (Minimum Viable Product): According to Mr. Eric Ries - author of "The Lean Startup" (2011), MVP is the version of a new product that includes three elements:
- Is a very streamlined product version but still provides a complete user experience and can be released to the market.
- Allows businesses to collect maximum user feedback with minimal resources.
- Can continue to be improved through this feedback.

MVP is usually implemented in the Earliest Usable stage - when businesses collect insights from actual users instead of just assumptions from the business.

Read more: The Coffee House accompanied GEEK Up to build the first lean MVP version

Impactful Product: This is the stage when digital products are loved and widely accepted by the market (Mass Adoption) and moves towards becoming "Impactful Product" - a digital product that makes a positive impact, meeting the business problem of the business with the most perfect and optimal user experience in terms of technology.

When starting a project to build a digital product with a partner, the first thing GEEK Up cares about is what value this product will help bring to businesses and users. And Impactful Product is the philosophy that best demonstrates this.