How to design your life and business

I'm utilizing my process for UX design in creating my own business because some of the same principles apply. Although I've never realistically been able to follow this entire process sequentially from start to finish, it's a good guide when things get complicated (which in real life they always seem to do). You can always refer back to "ideal" steps when you find yourself lost or challenges seem too large to know where to go next.

I find myself following at least most of these steps when I'm breaking down how to start building a business when there's no guidance and you want forge your unique path to a certain extent. The first step of a design brief is just asking yourself basic questions. Who is your main target customers? Research is seeing what else is out there and then seeing how you can differentiate. Writing or thinking about customer user journeys is just understanding your users full path to getting to buy your product and perhaps what they do afterwards and improving upon problems along that path to better their experience. Requirements are the next stage. There's a level of iterating along the way that happens fairly often but the more requirements and knowledge you have upfront of possible fees, issues and the entire plan across a few areas of marketing, sales, product development, customer support etc the less mistakes you'll make hence wasting less time and spending less money.

Competitive analysis is something I love to do. For my matcha + collagen product I actually went to Whole Foods and analyzed all the similar and related products. I was looking at branding, product packaging, price, size etc. The next step is brainstorming and lo-fidelity concepts. When it comes to running your own business I would use cheap and easy tools like sketching, getting feedback from friends and family, creating a landing page with mailing list signup or some quick ideation tools like blogging or Illustrator. After that I've gotten feedback and not held on to my ideas too closely. As a designer I've wanted to keep something to myself until I feel completely confident that it's the best it can be and to risk early criticism but as I've gotten older and more experienced I feel that sharing an idea can really help to weed out problems because everyone has different perspectives and slightly different needs that you may have not accounted for. You have to check your ego out the door and take any feedback with a grain of salt and filter that back into ultimately making a much better product.

Once testing, and reviewing any kind of mockup or prototype that looks as close to your final product as possible then I would go ahead and move forward. For example, for my yoga apparel I uploaded the design onto printful so I could see what they would look like on an actual model from every angle before buying a pair myself. I'm still waiting for them to arrive so I can try them on but it's the quickest and cheapest prototype before selling to customers and improving any problems with the end result.

From there if you have to make multiple rounds of changes, then hopefully you have the time/money for the extra leeway before having to sell. With that process in mind, you will reach the point where you feel confident enough to launch. When customer orders pour in and you receive feedback from actual paying clients you then will have to go back in your process again and again just like with UX design for software. WAALAAH! you're on your way! : )

#designyourlife #UXforbusiness #userexperience