Project Objectives and Approach
In the sample chapter from A Project Guide to UX Design: For User Experience Designers in the Field or in the Making, 3rd Edition by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler, the authors discuss the importance of clear project objectives and understanding various project methodologies. The chapter covers how to establish solid project goals and the impact of different approaches like Waterfall and Agile on project management and team dynamics. It also addresses how to handle unclear objectives from project leadership and suggests methods to align project goals with strategic business initiatives.
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Know Which Star to Navigate By
One of the keys to a good project is to start the team out with clear project objectives and a well-understood approach. Ideally, the project leadership will have this defined for you—but how do you know if they don’t?
This chapter talks about forming project objectives and offers some questions that will help you solidify those goals. We’ll also discuss some common project approaches (or methodologies) and how they may influence the way you work.
Carolyn Chandler
You’re in the project kickoff, with the full team for the first time. The project manager hands out some materials and gives you an overview of the project. By the end of the meeting, ideally, you should have enough information to answer the following:
Why is the project important to the company?- How will stakeholders determine if the project was a success?
- What approach or methodology will the project follow?
- What are the major dates or milestones for key points, such as getting approval from business stakeholders?
All of these questions concern the expectations that stakeholders have for the project: what the project will accomplish and how they will be involved in it. The first two questions pertain to the project’s objectives and the last two to the project’s approach.
A project objective is a statement of a measurable goal for the project. Let’s talk about objectives in more detail.
Solidify Project Objectives
Objectives are important focusing lenses that you’ll use throughout the project. They should spring from the client company’s overall business strategy, so the project objectives should be in line with the strategic initiatives within the company. For example, if there is a strategic initiative to appeal to a new group of prospective customers (called a market), the project you’re working on may be an effort to provide that market with better online access to products and services relevant to them. The objective for that project would then be focused on reaching and engaging that market.
A clear objective resonates throughout a project. It helps you:
- Ask the right questions as you gather ideas from business stakeholders.
- Run discovery activities, such as research with users, and focus your analysis of the results.
- Detail the ideas gathered from stakeholders and users and convert them into a consolidated list of project ideas.
- Prioritize those project ideas based on their value to the company.
- Define the product and its features in order to focus design and development.
- Create effective design concepts and prototypes.
- Manage requests for changes to the design once development begins.
- Focus efforts during deployment activities (such as training and communications to users about the new site or application before and during its launch).
- Determine whether you’ve met the needs of the client company, once the project is complete.
When you start a new project, you probably have objectives from the project’s sponsor (the business stakeholder who has direct responsibility for the success of the project or the product manager, if you have one), as well as a set of project-related requests coming from business stakeholders and from customers, but they all may be a bit fuzzy (Figure 4.1). Your goal is to clarify these into a group of solid statements that you can use as a yardstick for the project’s success.
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Figure 4.1 Fuzzy objectives, ideas, and needs
A solid objective has three key characteristics. It is:
- Easy to understand: Avoid insider terminology.
- Distinct: Avoid vague statements; instead, use wording that seems like it will be useful when you’re prioritizing requirements.
- Measurable: Make concrete statements that you can set an independent measurement against to determine your success.
As you define a fuzzy objective, making it clear and measurable, it becomes a solid objective that you can base decisions on (Figure 4.2).
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Figure 4.2 Objectives being solidified
You’ll hear many statements that could be considered objectives. Analyzing fuzzy ones such as those below will help you solidify your objectives and communicate more effectively within the project team.
“Our objective is to become the market leader in industry x.”
This is an objective for the entire company, but it is too broad for a specific project. Multiple initiatives at the company need to come together to make this happen; any one digital product may help with this but will be very unlikely to be able to handle the entire burden.
“Our objective is to generate excitement among our customer base.”
This one is better, because a digital product could have an impact on this, but it’s still too vague. Why is it important to generate excitement? How does that excitement translate into meeting a business need? And how can you tell if you’ve been successful?
“Our objective is to increase the number of returning users by 10 percent.”
Now we’re getting close. This one is easy to measure, but it’s too focused on an intermediate step. Suppose more users do return after their first experience—it may not help you if people don’t perform the actions you think are important once they get there.
Fuzzy objectives can give you a sense of a client’s desires and larger goals. From these you can craft more solid project objectives, such as:
- Increase the revenue from online product sales by 10 percent.
- Increase the revenue from online advertising by 20 percent.
- Increase the number of current and potential customers in our customer database to at least 20,000.
- Deliver highly rated and highly referenced content to our primary users. (Note that this one requires some work to decide how to measure “highly rated” and “highly referenced,” but the elements are there to build from.)
Each of these can be measured and affected by your project. They can also map pretty closely to your designs and the features offered. For example, it’s very common to offer an email newsletter as a way to meet an objective of growing the customer database. To deliver the newsletter you’ll need to capture customer email addresses, which will be added to the database. Objectives may also bring out new product ideas. For example, if you’re measuring success by the average rating given to articles available in your product, you’ll need a feature that allows users to give ratings. In these ways, objectives help you focus as you gather ideas for the product, and these may later become prioritized features.
If there are multiple objectives, be sure to create a prioritized list with your business sponsor and project team. Objectives sometimes conflict with each other during design, and the team will need to know what takes precedence. The final prioritized list of objectives should come from your project sponsor or product manager.
Pairing Product Analytics and Objectives
If you’re working on a brand-new product, you’ll want to track some common product analytics to set the stage for measuring progress in the future. Some important analytics to consider are:
- Acquisition: How many new users download or sign up for your product (on a daily, weekly, or quarterly basis for example)?
- Activation: How many new users interact with the product in a meaningful way, like reading an article or writing a review?
- Retention: What percentage of your users come back after the first use and continue to return over a period of time?
- Referral: How many users refer the product to other people? How many of those referrals sign up?
- Revenue: How many users take an action that generates money for the company in some fashion (like viewing an ad, making a purchase, or subscribing)?
If you’re working on enhancements to a digital product that already exists, your team will ideally have some analytics currently in place. Anytime you deploy a new release, review the data gathered before and after that release to see if you can measure the results of your changes.
To help keep a clear focus across iterations of a product, teams often choose a small number of analytics to be key performance indicators (or KPIs) that visualize positive or negative changes to product usage.
Your stakeholders may have one metric over all of them that should be a focus for a particular team because it aligns with the company’s overall strategy for that product. This metric is referred to as the North Star because it’s one focal point used to guide decisions and measure progress. For example, a brand-new product may have an acquisition North Star around the growth of the user base. For a more mature product, the North Star might be around increasing engagement with a feature set key to business value, such as something that generates revenue.