No matter what industry you are in your customers/users will go through a certain lifecycle with regards to your product or service, starting from being completely unaware of it, to e.g. considering buying/using it, to purchasing it and needing support after the purchase.
Depending on what product/service you offer the user lifecycle will be slightly different, but it is always there and one which is as important for the UX designer to know inside out as it is for the business who has briefed the UX designer.
The value of the lifecycle
Most companies will (hopefully) have a good idea of who their customers/users are. They will also know that no user is the same but that it’s important to define your target audience as designing for everyone means that you design for noone.
When you talk about target audiences it’s normally in a rather broad sense describing a group of people, e.g. of a certain age, gender, marital status, profession, interest, etc. and describing their needs based hereon becomes rather generic. That’s why you normally need to further define it into user groups based on e.g. the task they are looking to carry out like first time buyer, looking to remortgage, looking for insurance etc.
If you then start to identify the different needs your user groups may have depending on how far they have come in the process of e.g. finding a mortgage, and you combine it with the level of experience they’ve previously had with your service/product, you start to see that you have users who are looking for very different things.
By identifying the different lifecycles and their stages based on your different types of customers/users, you develop a tool which can be used over and over again. Not only to define what the user needs are at each stage, but also what the business needs are. It’s a good way to help define your client’s business objectives, or if you happen to be the client then it’s a good way for you to become more aware of them. It will also help you identify needs which you otherwise wouldn’t have thought of. Last but not least, having a clear overview of both the user and the business needs across the lifecycle becomes a valuable tool which can help both the client and the UX designer define and agree upon what stages that are the most important and where the most effort should be put in. This in turn can help prioritise requirements.
Defining the lifecycle
The lifecycle can be done to be very specific or it can be kept at a more generic level and done for a user group like someone looking for a mortgage for the first time. It can also focus on different things. From a normal purchase lifecycle describing the pre- and the post purchase stages, to focusing on the experience of using a system, to engaging in an online activity like a campaign, or to defining how a user’s usage of your product/service becomes more sophisticated over time.
I’ve mostly worked with purchase or engagement lifecycles starting from when the user becomes aware of a product/service or campaign through to post purchase/enagement and when the time comes to start the lifecycle all over again by e.g. buying a replacement product/service. It’s a tool I use a lot in the initial workshops with the client and when doing experience planning at the early stages of the project where we define the objective of the experience (more on this in a later post).
Joshua Porter talks about the usage lifecycle and that “…people go through a progression as they use software.” starting from being unaware to being passionate users. He describes ‘The usage lifecycle’ as having five main stages with hurdles between them. It looks like this:
Here’s how he describes the stages (direct quote from Joshua’s blog):
[list type=”arrow”]
[/list]
Read more about the importance of utilising the lifecycle and about Joshua’s usage lifecycle in his blog and LukeW’s notes from the talk Joshua did during webdagene on the same topic.
As I can’t share the lifecycles that I’ve done for our clients I’ll develop some fictive ones in the near future and go through the process of how I work with them in detail.
