The lean steps to improve your user experience and optimize your conversion rate!

1- Uncover your pain points

If you read this article and are interested in lean UX you might already have an idea of the problems your product has. Write them down and look for other ones : look for red-flags in your usage statistics, ask your users, ask your customer service, anybody who is interacting in any way with your end users.

2- Define your standards

In this step you will work with your pain points to define your standards :

• First, for each pain point explain why you consider it a pain point.

• Then find an indicator for this pain point to measure the obtained performance/improvement of your product/service after change.

• For each indicator define what value it should have, a standard which will become one of your business goals.

Once this is done, you will be equipped to control more effectively the changes you wish to make to your product or service.

We define a problem as a difference between what you have and what you should have (your business goal, your standard). You can't know you have a problem if you don't have standards and goals.

3- Understand why

For each problem, iterate through causes, and list your hypothesis. Brainstorm with your team on what could have caused these pain points. When you find a possible cause for the problem don't stop at that first guess, you could be looking at a symptom rather than a cause and miss the underlying problem.
We have a method called "the five 'why's" which consists in asking yourself 'why' at least 5 times to find a good cause to a problem.

4- Gather solutions

Organize a brainstorm with your team to gather ideas to answer each of your problems. Consider each hypothesis from step 3 and propose potential solutions.

5- Prioritize your solutions

Keep the solutions that might best answer the problem and that are less risky to implement.

6- Testing, measuring, improving!

You are now ready to A/B test your solutions. You should first address the problem which is the most crucial / risky for your business and therefore choose to implement the corresponding solution first. Once your solution is implemented, follow your indicators and keep the solution only if it improves them. Afterwards, you can then test another solution and repeat your last steps: testing, measuring and improving! As your indicators are your only way to measure the efectiveness of a solution it is really important that you choose good and representative ones.
Be careful to implement 1 solution at a time and compare always an old solution with a new one so that when your indicators evolve you know exactly which change/solution is the cause.

These steps are really useful as they bring you business goals and clear directions to improve your product/service. In my experience businesses have no difficulties to find their pain points, they may even list a ton of things to improve. But they have more difficulties to prioritize and set clear directions which slows down the whole improvement process.

Also these steps aren't limited to business with problems to solve. As it provides you goals and indicators it allows you to also monitor the performances of your new or already existing business. As uses and users habits evolve rapidly, continuous improvement is really important and much needed for digital product and services.

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Want to find out more?

Here are other articles on user experience :

The UI/UX of your B2B application, the engine of your team's productivity by Nelly Seiglan

The 5 commandments of UX design by Héloïse Bonan

5 reasons why a UX-Designer is essential for mobile application development by Arthur Jacquemet