To persuade your team to look past quick wins, you need to understand the funnel
How RICE prioritization and Funnel Analysis can help you re-prioritize design problems
Stop me if you’ve experienced this before: you present your team with several design recommendations that you’ve found through user feedback.
Everyone’s entirely on board with minor quick Design fixes that’ll have some impact. But you hear crickets when you present an underlying user issue that will require significant effort to fix.
Whether it’s “out of scope,” “not part of MVP,” or any other reason, your team isn’t convinced to make more significant changes. Even if it eventually results in users stopping using your product, you can’t seem to persuade your team to take action.
If this has happened to you, it’s essential to understand how problems get prioritized.
Understand that not all UX problems are equal
“The decision about whether to fix a design flaw should certainly consider how much use it’ll get: it might not be worth the effort to improve a feature that has few users” — Jakob Nielsen, N/Ng
Many designers fail to realize one fundamental concept: not all UX problems are equal.
If one ‘critical’ problem during onboarding affects millions of users and another “critical” problem in the settings menu affects five people, many designers often present them as equal problems.
One reason for this is that some Designers are afraid of making decisions. Whether they’re worried about stepping on Product Managers' toes (i.e., “Making decisions for them”) or feel biased if they give specific design recommendations, they want to present everything equally.
However, this is often to the user's detriment. If you feel this way, imagine yourself as a wine sommelier.
Your customer (i.e., your team/client) is coming in with a limited amount of money, and your menu might have 100 different things (i.e., problems to fix).
It’s your job to recommend good pairings to help them make decisions. That doesn’t mean hiding usability findings; it’s about understanding their resources and suggesting what best fits them.
For example, if the team has two weeks to make all UX changes, you suggest different things than if the team has two months.
The customer or client can ignore your suggestions and choose something else, but limiting options can help your team make the right decision.
To help you do that, we need to look beyond items like Impact/Effort Matrixes.
Why Impact/effort is not enough
The primary tool designers use for feature prioritization is an Impact/Effort matrix.
The idea is to bring up a list of features, work with the team to place them on a 2x2 matrix and vote on them.
These sections are then divided into 4 categories, which are:
Quick Wins: High Impact — Low Effort
Major Projects: High Impact — High Effort
Fill Ins: Low Impact-Low Effort
Money Pit: Low impact-High Effort
However, some organizations may only do the first step and then focus on Quick Wins only. Even if there are some potentially useful things in the Major Project category, mapping these things out and voting solely based on features may not persuade your team.
To do that, we need to ask one additional question:
Reach: How many people are likely to be affected by this issue?
This question is part of another framework, the RICE prioritization method, which quantifies specific features by understanding four factors:
Reach: How many users will be affected by an issue?
Impact: What is the severity of the issue?
Confidence: How sure are you about your Reach and Impact estimates?
Effort: How long is this going to take?
By factoring in Reach, we can show one additional factor: how many people would likely be affected if we made a potential usability change.
Of course, that’s not something you can figure out just by talking with five users. To make use of Reach, we also need to understand the Funnel.
Funnel Analysis and RICE: you know more than you think
Some of you have heard about the Funnel before, and you likely understand it more than you think.
Simply put, the Funnel is about mapping out a single question:
What is the process like from (X, Broad thing) to (Y, Specific thing)?
A marketer, for example, will outline the steps to going from “Just Browsing” to “Becoming a Long-term customer.” Not everyone browsing the website will become long-term customers, but many might.
However, what’s more important to understand is Funnel Analysis, the process of understanding where people get stuck.
This is important because funnels are one-directional, so you can see where people are getting stuck and dropping off.
If 2000 people land on the homepage and 400 navigate to the Product page, you will never get more than 400 people to check product details, buy a product, and more.
This is most likely because 1600 have abandoned your website and gone elsewhere.
So when we combine these two ideas, RICE prioritization, and the funnel, we can understand one specific point:
If we know a particular usability problem happens early on in the workflow, more users are likely to be affected by it
We might be unable to give a specific estimate, such as “1600 users will be affected if we fix this,” you’d need to look at Analytics to figure that out.
However, we likely know our users' workflows through design artifacts (like User Journey Maps) or user testing and observation. So, if critical usability problems occur early in the workflow, we can use that to argue for implementing “Major Projects.”
For example, imagine we had an onboarding problem that was likely to become a Major Project, requiring a complete re-design.
To be effective in communicating why your team should take action, we might want to say something like this:
“Many users are getting stuck during onboarding due to usability issues, which is a critical issue. While I know this may be a significant effort to re-design it, if we fail to do this, it doesn’t matter how many cool features we design: most users will never see them because they’ve abandoned our website.”
By highlighting how that cool new feature that the Product team is excited to build will never be used because users aren’t reaching that page, you may get your teams to change their minds.
Most Usability problems don’t exist in Isolation
At a certain point, beyond small-scale design fixes, changes you make on one screen will likely impact another. After all, users have to add a product to a cart before checking out. If that process is problematic, fewer users will likely check out.
Understanding user workflows and prioritizing problems early on is a method for getting your team on board with Major projects. Even if you can’t give exact estimates, understanding Reach and the Funnel allows you to provide more compelling arguments for tackling problems that occur early on.
So, if you’re struggling to get your team to act on slightly larger Design issues, consider your user’s workflow and where these dropoffs might occur.
It might help you make your point more clearly.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Creator of the Data and Design newsletter. His book, Data-Informed UX Design, provides 21 small changes you can make to your design process to leverage the power of data and design.