Production
This is the last phase of the UX process and will continue till the product's UX process lifecycle exists.
The production phase actually can start with the design of the UX process, especially when we start developing our product, since that is the phase where we start giving feedback for a product which we can visually see, touch, and feel.
From my own experience, usually I like to separate the production phase into two parts:
- Beta release
- Live product
By doing this, it makes it easier for me to leverage the design and do quality assurance and usability testing before the live release of the product.
When the product goes live, the UX team and other teams involved start generating different documents and statistics about the product by measuring the performance that our product is offering.
We can collect data in different ways, as follows:
- Collecting performance reports: Usually, here, we will have data on how our product is responding on the performance side–whether it is slow, whether the users had any problem finishing a specific task, and more.
- Collecting of analytical reports: Sometimes, I call them demographic reports–who is using our product, their profiles, or how they are accessing it. It is good to create some kind of dashboard to put all these pieces of information in one place and provide different options for filtering so that we can have a clear idea of what is going on.
- Issue-reporting: Issue-reporting inside our product is another important area when we go to production. Usually, we listen to the users here, understand their issues, and then analyze what was developed wrongly and how much time we need to fix it.
- Help support: By having this place in our product, we can easily collect data from our user feedback, what they want, what hassle they have when they use the product, which features they are suggesting, and more. By having all these pieces of data, it is easier for us to predict the next step, which is what to provide to our users or the customer category based on the requirements noted in our support center.
When our product is live, the ongoing measurement and monitoring of the data created by different users or our customers helps us to take the next decisions to improve and ensure the life cycle of the product. This kind of information is key for keeping our product live and usable for a long period of time.
So, as you can see, the main thing we do after our product is live is delve more deeply into the analytics of the product.
Keep supporting your product when it is live and try to improve the parts where your product is lacking to provide the best experience to its user base.