What should you have for designing a product that will win the market? A keen eye for aesthetics, a checklist of features, or a repetitive plan of your competitors? No, you should have an empathetic understanding of your users, their motivations, and the challenges they face. It's key that we (designers) name "goal-directed design". This is a methodology that places users' objectives at the core of your product development process to ensure that every feature, interaction, and design decision matches with what truly matters to them.
Your main task is not to develop a product but to create a digital solution that becomes an integral part of users' daily lives, and they will love it. Our experts decided to help you with this and gathered all essential information on goal directed design and how to do it for your product.
In this article:
- Find out how goal-directed design leads to higher user satisfaction and better business results.
- Learn how to understand your users 100%.
- Get practical tips to guide you in your own design process.
What Is Goal-Directed Design?
Goal-directed design is a user-centered approach with accent on understanding and addressing end users' goals. It focuses on how a product fits into users' lives and helps them achieve their desired outcomes effectively. Firstle, we analyze user behavior, motivations, and pain points. Then, it is important to define user personas to represent users' goals, frustrations, and needs. Focusing on real data and insights derived from user observation, we will avoid designing for hypothetical users.
Types of User Goals
Each person is an individual with feelings, emotions, lifestyle, and hobbies, right? The same is true of goal-directed design! Understanding the various types of user goals is important and helpful to crafting an experience that meets user needs, improves their experience, influences retention, and reaches business goals. There are three main user goals: experience, end, and life goals. If you know how to work with them, you can design more effectively and deliver product value in a meaningful way.
Experience Goals
Experience goals are the emotional and sensory desires users have while interacting with a product. These goals can include feeling confident, avoiding frustration, or enjoying a pleasant, effortless experience.
Your main question here: "How do users want to feel?".
Imagine you create a financial app. What goals may users have? For example, control over their finances or confidence in the platform's security. Clear data visualization, simple workflows, and accessible support channels are the design elements that help achieve these goals.
End Goals
End goals are specific outcomes users want to achieve through a product (e.g., buy something, schedule a meeting, or learn a new skill). They are the primary reason users engage with a product: they have a task and want a solution that efficiently gets them to the finish line.
Your main question here: "What task does the user want to accomplish?".
Imagine you design an e-commerce website that sells laptops, PCs, smartphones, etc. Make it easy for users to compare products, add them to the cart, and complete the purchase without confusion or unnecessary steps.
Life Goals
Life goals are long-term aspirations that users want to achieve that go beyond their immediate interaction with a product. These goals are closely related to their identity, motivation, and values. They may include improving health, achieving professional success, or developing meaningful relationships.
Your main question here: "How will my product affect the future of people?".
For example, what is the life goal of designers who use the design tool? Probably, building a successful freelance career. How will your tool help them achieve this goal? By promoting creativity, effective project management, and easy client communication. If you meet the users' long-term vision, you can ensure the tool remains an essential part of their lives. What will you get? Increased engagement and loyalty!
Research for Goals
The main rule of a goal-directed design is understanding user needs, motivations, and behaviors. Successful products balance user satisfaction with business viability and technical feasibility. There are several goal types, and now we offer you different techniques and tools for qualitative research.
Life Goals
Life goals research helps understand a user's identity and long-term aspirations. If it is qualitative, your product design will increase user loyalty and engagement.
End Goals
Qualitative and quantitative methods help observe users' task completion paths to prioritize features that efficiently support desired outcomes.
Experience Goals
Empathic research is very useful here. It helps designers create user experiences that reduce stress and provide control. We focus on interface details like easy navigation, reducing cognitive load, and providing timely feedback.
Nonuser Goals
Not all goals are user-centered! We should also focus on nonuser goals that cover business goals, customer goals, and technical constraints or opportunities. What is it for? Check that the product is commercially viable, meets stakeholder expectations, and is technically possible.
Business Goals
It's about the organization's objectives for a product (profitability, market share, user acquisition, brand positioning, and differentiation). They help match the design with the company's strategic aims and offer appropriate features.
Customer Goals
Customer goals are the needs of stakeholders beyond the end user, such as decision-makers, buyers, or customers who do not directly use the product. The goal is to design a product to satisfy end users and align with purchasing decisions.
Technical Goals
Technical goals are constraints, requirements, and opportunities in development and engineering (scalability, performance, security, and maintainability). They require collaboration with engineering teams, assessment of technical feasibility, and understanding of platform limitations.
But how to uncover the root cause behind user behavior and decisions? How to avoid the surface-level issues and get a deeper understanding of the real purposes and motivations behind users' actions? The best technique we use and can recommend is the 5 Whys.
Technique 5 Whys for Right Understanding User Real Purposes
The 5 Whys methodology is a structured research method that aims to understand the underlying purpose or motivation behind user problems.
Here’s how it works:
- Identify a problematic user behavior or statement.
- Ask ‘Why’ to understand user behavior. (Why are the users behaving that way? Remember that the first answer is usually a surface-level explanation).
- Continue asking “why” about each subsequent answer until you reach the underlying user goal or purpose (Typically, five times).
Let’s look at an example of the 5 Whys in practice.
Imagine you are working on improving the onboarding experience for a productivity app and notice that users are not completing the process.
1st Why:
Why are users not completing the onboarding process?
The answer can be, “Users find the onboarding steps too long and overwhelming.”
2nd Why:
Why do users find the onboarding steps overwhelming?
The answer can be, “The onboarding asks for too much information at once, and it makes them feel overwhelmed.”
3rd Why:
Why does asking for too much information make them feel overwhelmed?
The answer can be, “Users want to start using the app immediately and don’t see the immediate value of giving all that information upfront.”
4th Why:
Why do users want to start using the app immediately?
The answer can be, “They have a specific task or goal they want to achieve right away and see the onboarding as a barrier to getting started.”
5th Why:
Why is it important for users to achieve that task right away?
Users feel that productivity apps should save time, not consume it, and they expect to get value from the app immediately.
So, we found out that the primary user goal is to start using the app immediately. What should you do? Enhance user productivity without delays, enable a quicker onboarding process that focuses on essential steps, and allow users to skip the onboarding and come back later if needed. Only now can you start the design process or redesign your product.
Arounda Tips for Effectively Applying the 5 Whys
- Be non-judgmental. Users must feel comfortable explaining their reasoning to get to the root of the problem.
- Base your questions on real data from user interviews, usability testing, or customer feedback.
- Collaborate with team members.
- Know when to stop. Although the technique is called the 5 Whys, the number is a guideline. Sometimes, you need fewer or more iterations to uncover the root cause.
- Focus on goals, not symptoms, to create value beyond simply fixing surface issues.
Interested how the final results look like? Welcome to our case studies to see what is this “goal-directed design”. And now it’s time to uncover the entire goal-directed design process!
How to Design Useful Products with Goal-Centered Design?
The goal-centered approach helps create functional, useful, and enjoyable products, emphasizing effective user interface design as a key component. We offer the following plan for designing useful products.
Step 1
Develop detailed personas according to user research, and try to understand why users want your product.
Step 2
Build scenarios that reflect real-world situations in which people will use your product and prioritize the features that will help them reach their goals.
Step 3
Try to make tasks simple and reduce complexity in the UI design. Avoid overloading the interface with features or decorations that do not serve the user's purpose.
Step 4
Provide well-thought-out guidance (e.g., onboarding tips, tooltips, or gamification elements) and immediate informative feedback (e.g., a confirmation message or visual change when the user completes the task).
Step 5
Create an adaptive UI and multiple pathways to goal achievement because everyone is different, including their needs and convenient process styles.
Step 6
Conduct usability testing and iterate based on feedback to optimize the product and better serve users' objectives.
Step 7
Align design with business and technical goals to ensure that the product delivers value to both users and stakeholders.
Useful Products Design Process
All businesses want to craft a useful and successful product. To do so, you have to develop a structured process that meets all aspects of user and business goals. If we compare traditional design approaches to goal-centered approaches, the first prioritizes aesthetics or trends, and the second focuses on delivering true value. At Arounda, we love the second one. Now, let's discover the key stages of the design process.
1. Research
Explore user behaviors, needs, and pain points. We conduct research in three stages:
- Stakeholder interviews
- User interviews and ethnographic studies
- Competitive analysis
Why deep research is so important? Because designing features based on assumptions or general design biases will not solve the real users' problems.
2. Modeling
The next step is modeling, where you should develop personas representing user archetypes (demographics, behaviors, goals, and frustrations). Then, think about scenarios and use cases that depict real-world situations. And one more thing—the "one-size-fits-all" approach doesn't work anymore!
3. Requirements Definition
Identify product requirements from user research and scenarios and divide them into three categories:
- Functional requirements outline the product's functionality to support user and business goals.
- Experience requirements determine the user experience for a seamless, intuitive, and enjoyable interaction.
- Technical and business requirements balance user needs, technical feasibility, and business constraints to provide realistic, achievable solutions that will drive business success.
4. Framework Definition
The framework definition phase is important in creating a product's structural blueprint. This includes creating an interaction framework to visualize user journeys using storyboards, flow diagrams, and navigation maps. Then, designers create wireframes to outline key content areas and functionalities. Finally, they validate wireframes through feedback loops to show real input.
5. Refinement
The refinement stage involves a visual designer transforming wireframes and structural designs into polished products. It has three main processes:
- Crafting high-fidelity prototypes to test branding, layout, and color schemes of the final product.
- Keeping a consistent visual language and aligning UI design with brand guidelines.
- Iterative usability testing to identify areas of confusion or distraction.
6. Development Support
The final stage is development support to accurately translate a product vision into a functional solution. This involves:
- Design handoff, where designers and UX specialists work with developers to implement all aspects correctly.
- Regular cross-team collaboration to prevent deviations due to technical constraints or miscommunication.
- Post-development, when the design team performs a design quality assurance check to maintain visual fidelity, functionality, and usability.
We understand how challenging it can be to manage every stage of the design process and maintain the highest quality. That's why we're here—to help and guide you through it all. Our UI/UX design services will lead your product from concept to success easily and flawlessly.
Final Thoughts
Crafting a handy product is not about designing software. It means touching your users' lives and becoming their best friends. Goal-directed design is your key to creating products that inspire trust, bring satisfaction, and build long-lasting relationships with your users.
We at Arounda know that this process requires empathy, insight, and a great commitment to quality. These are our core principles. And we will be very happy to become your copilot on this trip and bring your vision to life with clarity and excellence. Let's build products that resonate, inspire, and change lives.
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