UX Showcase
Some examples of small UX projects I have worked on
Different companies have different definitions. For the purposes of this discussion, let's focus on projects that UX designers can complete within one week. My previous projects include:
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Addressing a page that has a 25% drop-off rate. Aiming to find a solution that a UX designer can deliver within one week, with a development effort less than 30 story points.
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In a B2B business context, spending one week identifying a UX improvement that encourages more potential customers to contact us.
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Validating potentials for a feature, having wireframes ready for roadmap review and technical evaluation.
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Planning a new landing page. The content is partly ready, and we want designs that meet our needs: user-friendly, SEO-focused, and designed to lead to purchase our products.
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Customers have difficulty understanding our product packages. We need to find a solution to ease this pain while staying within development budget.
Key considerations for small UX projects
Alignment
In most cases, small UX projects are not very complex, but they take much longer than expected due to misalignment. A clear briefing is very important.
However, providing a clear design briefing is not easy for stakeholders for the following reasons:
- They are not designers and don't know what exactly the designers need.
- They don’t have a clear picture in mind yet and are open to suggestions.
What I have very helpful is creating briefing templates for stakeholders. This helps the team list all the knowns and unknowns, must-haves and optionals, and plan a project openly from different perspectives.
​A design briefing template
Goals of the project, scale, risks, category (new feature, improvement, idea exploration...), technical limitations, must-haves, optionals, milestone or timeline, whether usability test is needed...
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​Role and responsibility clarification
What makes even small-scale UX projects hard to proceed with is that roles and responsibilities are not clear within companies. UX designers cannot make UX decisions.
In some very large companies, where roles and responsibilities are clearly defined, I see fewer problems of this kind.
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​Technical evaluations
Often, small UX projects are also expected to require minimal development effort. It is wise to chat with developers or tech leads and compare different design proposals to ensure the project stays within scope.​
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UX project example (small scale)
Reduce un-install rate
About
Our product manager asked me whether we can find a way to reduce the first-day uninstall rate of our mobile app. Our average first-day uninstall rate was around14%. This means our users installed our app, found it useless, and uninstalled it.​
Locating the Problem
What can be reasons for it being deemed 'useless'?
- Users do not understand how to use our app.
- There is no public Wi-Fi near them (our app helps users connect to public Wi-Fi without asking for the password).
From previous usability tests, we have excluded the first potential reason, so we are focusing on the second reason.
In this case, there are two touchpoints for new users who have just installed our app:
1. the welcome page
2. the first view/interface of the mobile app
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Solution
On one hand, we designed a welcome page to inform users to use our app in city centers (graphic: shopping mall). On the other hand, included a 'tip box' to advise users that they should be in an area with Wi-Fi when using our app.​​
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Result:
The design works! The first day uninstall rate dropped from 14% to below 10%.
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UX project example (mini scale)
Increase conversion rate
About
This is a 3-hour project that helped the landing page increase its conversion rate by 111%.​​
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Challenges
This company has many landing pages focused on SEO. Since they don't have much traffic and the conversion rates are low, these pages are packed with content but lack design. It was very complicated to compete for design resources (UI and graphic) for these pages.
So, I started a bi-weekly working mode with our SEO specialist; every two weeks, I spend 2-3 hours improving one page.
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Solution
What I found was that the content on these SEO landing pages was good. The pages were very long and had no graphics to support the storytelling.
I divided the content into short paragraphs (a maximum of 5 sentences per paragraph) and created simple but consistent graphics to enhance the storytelling. This way, users have a much better experience when reading these pages. They can capture the content by scanning the titles, have graphics to support their reading, and the page itself looks more trustworthy.
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Result:
Surprisingly, after tracking the landing page for 3 months following the improvements, the conversion rate increased by 111% with just 3 hours of manpower!
Some examples of medium UX projects I have worked on
Medium scale projects to me are the ones from scratch to final wireframe delivery are within 3 months. My previous medium scale projects include:
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Re-working a page or one part of user flow
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In a B2B business context, concept making for a feature that is requested by customers
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'How to create loyalty' 'how to increase trustworthiness' 'how to make customers come back' yearly design planning
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Building/regbuilding information architecture and sustainable framework for a web tool
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A design project is requested, which has unclear goals and many stakeholders.
Key considerations for medium UX projects
Besides the ones I have mentioned above for small scale UX projects, I recommend the followings:
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Expectation management
Make sure that stakeholders and teams are aware of theses projects are not small ones, how much time it might take and why. Many of these project might seem very simple to non-designers, I would definitely explain my thoughts.
Goals alignment
Especially for small companies, medium scale projects might already be expensive. Align goals: what do we want to achieve, how do we measure success.
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Plan usability test if necessary ​​
Show the result of a usability test often avoid unconstructive discussions in wireframe reviews.​​​
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UX project example (medium scale)
A new feature from scratch
About
On a used car history report, we wanted to show information about the current and previous owner of the vehicle. We wanted to ensure that the information we provided are useful to the customers.
For this project, the difficulties do not lie on how the information should be displayed.
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Challenges
- No clue what to show, where to start, and what data we have.
- Our company sells reports in several countries in Europe, and different countries have different definitions of personal information.
- I was new to the company, and many colleagues were unsure how to work with a UX designer.
- Lack of front-end developers.
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Innovation process
1. Kick-off meeting: a small gathering with the PO, UX, and head of customer success.
2. UX-planned workshop: we invited sales colleagues from different countries. Through planned tasks, we gathered a lot of information about "what information can provide value," "what scenarios users might need this information," and "what can be risky in which country."
3. Workshop result sorting: we combined, rephrased, and organised the information on a Confluence page, creating a table with 'what/why/risk category.'
4. Based on the Confluence page, the PO and data specialists explored the availability of valuable data that posed no high risk.
5. With a list of available data, UX quickly sketched wireframes and organised wireframe reviews.
6. Usability tests: using our tasks, we validated that the designs were successful. Users noticed and understood the information, incorporating it into their purchase considerations.
7. Wireframes were sent to UI and coding production.
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Some examples of Large UX projects I have worked on
Large scale projects to me are the ones from scratch to final wireframe delivery are longer than 3 months. My previous medium scale projects include:
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Re-designing a website
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Re-designing a digital product
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Developing a complex feature
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Researching and defining new branding or product strategies
Key considerations for large UX projects
Besides the ones I have mentioned above for small and medium-scale UX projects, I recommend the followings:
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Scale management
When large-scale (design-related) projects lack proper scale management, they may unnecessarily escalate into endless projects. What happens is that companies may have to abandon these projects because they become unaffordable. Besides losing months of manpower, these companies become very skeptical when planning any large-scale projects again (for example, redesign projects). I have seen this several times.​
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Goals alignment and key stakeholder alignment
Answer and align the following before or at the early phase of large-scale projects:
- Why do we have to do this project?
- Why do we have to do this project at this time?
- How do we measure success?
- How much manpower are we talking about?
- What can we do to keep the project within scope?
- What are the milestones?
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Well functioned design team is very important for large scale projects
A design team that includes 3 or 4 designers can be very efficient and powerful if they are skilful and experienced.
I have seen some design teams with 3 or 4 designers worked very well, while others have failed. I would say the keys are:
1. know-how. Team-leads or senior designers in the team need to know how easy/difficult different projects can be. A lot of problem solving projects were ignored because of lack of know-how.
2. output management. No designs can be perfect. It is essential to know how good is good enough for our company. Do not benchmark every single design detail with Apple or Google. On one hand, this wastes time and manpower; on the other hand, for a small team, it is an unrealistic expectation that will lead to a long term frustration.​​​​​
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