MetaLab’s design philosophy is pretty simple: We build excellent user experiences. That’s it. Our philosophy is 5 words long. It’s shorter than some Starbucks drink orders. 

When you only have 5 words in your design philosophy every word counts.  And if one word in that phrase counted  2   3 times, it would be “user.” 

User research is at the crux of our design process. We believe you can’t build a good product if you don’t know who you’re designing for. Call us design-led or research-led. We wouldn’t mind. We like words with hyphens. But that hyphenated list is missing that very important word in our 5-word philosophy: user. 

Our goal is to make useful, valuable, and beautiful products. That’s how you delight people and exceed your business goals. And to do all that, we have to know a lot about the people who’ll fall in love with your product. 

The more the designer knows about the user, the better the product will be. 

When you're building a chair just for you, one data point (your opinion) really matters. When you're building millions of the same chair to sell to millions of people, it makes sense to get a few more data points.

So who does the UX research at MetaLab?

Well, our research team does. It only makes sense. It’s in our title. But wherever possible, designers take part in ux research, too. Designers play an integral part—even if it isn’t explicitly in their title. Designers sit in on user interviews and sometimes moderate user testing or focus groups. 

The more the designer knows about the user, the better the product will be. 

And although UX researchers and the designers do the lion’s share of the user research work (with researchers doing the mother lion’s share—again research is in our name), every team member touches UX research. Including clients.

User research is not a solo effort. 

So how and when do you do UX research at MetaLab?

Honestly, there’s no time in a product’s lifecycle that you shouldn’t be researching. 

You should start with it and launch with it. And keep testing in production. It’s like voting. Do it early and often. 

We start our user research at the discovery phase at MetaLab. But that’s just the beginning. 

The first user research task for MetaLab is always a group effort to understand:

• What is this industry all about?
• What do customers care about?
• Who is this client really? And how can we help them meet their goals?

We dive into a lot of different spaces with a lot of cool clients. From fintech to fast food, we’re often the fresh eyes our clients need to see the forest and the trees. We come in with no preconceived notions, so we can leave with a great product. 

Our first phase is discovery. During discovery we: 

• Conduct secondary UX research (which is an inside baseball way to say reading a lot)
• Interview stakeholders
• Create experience maps
• Create assumption maps
• Hold cross-functional workshops (which we call kickoffs)

At this time, UX researchers are soaking up everything they can from stakeholders, articles, books, market research and anything available that relates to our design problem at hand. Plus, we’re creating assumption maps with the team. We’re building a strong foundation for the way ahead. 

After discovery, there is still user research to do. UX researchers dive into user experience, interviewing, testing, surveying. Designers continue checking what’s out there in the industry with direct and indirect competitors. They’re finding what’s great and what’s not-so-great. The goal is to find holes we can fill with awesome features and useful products. 

Honestly, there’s no time in a product’s lifecycle that you shouldn’t be researching. 

The UX researcher creates the research plan and the whole team piles on to review and refine it. Every team member is part of the final user research plan, even clients. A developer may need a different question answered than a content person who may need a different question answered than the client. All team members need to understand what the user wants and who the user is. 

After discovery we complete our competitive analysis and conduct:

• User interviews
• User tests on existing products
• Contextual inquiries (observing people in the situations they'd be using your product)
• Surveys

What does UX research touch during the design planning?

User research touches everything. Before designers pick up a pen or open their laptops to start sketching and prototyping, they need to know what features to work on. 

At MetaLab we create actionable UX research. We don’t make decks that sit locked in a vault like a treasure in an Indiana Jones movie. Our user research tells us what features the product needs to have and how important those features are. It’s important to us that our clients go to market with an MVP. Not too bloated to be overwhelming or unsustainable, not too lean to be useless. 

Our UX research creates a scoped and validated feature set. Once we have our prioritized feature set, our designers can open their laptops to sketch. 

So we’ve started wireframes and Hi-Fi design, how does UX research help now?

Now it’s time for some user experience testing! At the wireframe stage, our designers are focused on product flow and function. They create sketches we user test to answer some higher level questions. We test our designs to make sure they’re accomplishing what they’re meant to, are usable, and provide value. 

We test 1-2 times on wireframes and often 1-2 more when the designs are more polished, at the Hi-Fi state. And Hi-Fi, cornily enough, is a time for high fives. Watching users fall in love with your product can feel like you won the Superbowl. Although… no one has dumped icy Gatorade on a UX researcher at MetaLab. Yet. 

During wireframes and Hi-Fi we: 

• Conduct usability tests
• Conduct preference testing

After launch, there's more user research isn't there?

You got it. The future of a product is a researcher's ongoing responsibility. We’re there to help prioritize new features and to A/B test features in production. 

Good UX research, great product 

We’ve told you everything we do. It’s not a secret. We’re no more afraid of sharing this information than a Michelin-starred chef would be worried to tell you the ingredients of their flan. Because it’s not just the ingredients. It’s how you do it, the years of experience, the know-how to tell you that your flan will sink if you take it out of the oven too soon.

We’ve shipped more than 172 products. We make a pretty great metaphorical flan.

And we’re constantly refining—we learn more from every project.

Our advice to you: build for the user, keep things scoped, and design collaboratively. 

You can only do this with user research.

Now that you have a strategy and your differentiators in place, it’s time to draft the entire product experience into a single document. This is a key step in the product lifecycle called product definition. 

One of the key deliverables that comes out of the product definition is the product blueprint. Your product blueprint allows you to visualize the entire product service on one page. This helps manage its complexity, including the actions and touchpoints of all the actors, key features, technical dependencies, and operational requirements.

Behind the scenes, there are several key assets that power this product blueprint: 

This view helps to ensure your team is aligned on the critical pieces of success.

That being said, it’s easy to go overboard with product blueprints, so don’t boil the ocean! Focus on the few critical features and components that will make a big impact for your customers.

Remember to trust in yourself and the research that has been done. Your customers don't always know what the right solution is for their wants and needs. That's why it's your job to consider their needs in the context of your product's potential and develop an appropriate blueprint that can scale in the future.

We saw earlier that you’re going to be spending the majority of your time in the product definition/design, testing, and build phases, which means you need a talented team of skilled makers. 

This may seem obvious, but when building the right team with the right chemistry within your budget, there are a lot of factors to consider. How long will it take for the team to gel? Do you stick with who you have? When should you contract vs. hire?

Too often, we see companies spend big budgets hiring a ton of great developers and designers. They throw them onto a project expecting the product will be delivered fast only to find the team isn’t hitting their milestones. Why? 

Teams typically struggle to get going immediately because of differing working styles, personalities, mindsets, and honestly… sometimes ego. That’s why you shouldn’t focus on individual hires but on the team as a whole.

If you have time, budget, and desire to invest in the future culture of your company, you have to invest time to build the team dynamics. We find that it typically takes 4-5 sprints for a team to find its groove — approximately four months, or more.

If you are an early stage startup, and don’t have a lot of time (six months or less), but still want to get a product out there quickly, we recommend hiring a pre-built team of skilled makers who have launched several products together. 

The key takeaway is to not waste all of your time and money hiring. Building a successful team takes time and cycles of members working together to hit their stride. When necessary, augment with experts to help your team grow, add a skill, or just simply to outsource a function. It ultimately comes down to how you want to allocate your resources.

Don’t reinvent the wheel… and don’t build everything from scratch! Accelerators are existing tools and technologies you can leverage or integrate into your product.

Some of the tools that we use to help accelerate the design process to create and test out designs, concepts, and prototypes with users include Figma, Framer.io, and even Typeform.

For development, we use many different tools and platforms on our projects to help accelerate the product development lifecycle and build products that can scale to meet customer demand.  Several of the most popular and impactful integrations and platforms used by our teams include:

AI is everywhere these days for a reason. It’s powering brand new ways to get work done and being incorporated into almost every tool we already use to make workflows easier. From content creation to scheduling, we are seeing tools popping up for everything. Here are a few that can help accelerate product development:

There are important considerations to keep in mind when using any AI tool in a responsible way. Sensitivity of data uploaded into any of these systems and the originality of the content is a big one.

Policies and regulation with AI are still being figured out, so it’s wise to exercise caution when setting guidelines for your product teams. Leverage these tools as inspiration or starting points for copy, as pieces of a larger composite for images, or to get as specific as possible with prompts in order to generate something unique.

Product development succeeds when teams develop a culture of continuous learning. This is fueled by rigorous testing, analytics, and strategic iteration during key phases of the product lifecycle.

In the discovery phase, we immerse ourselves in understanding our potential early adopters' needs and motivations (see #validators). Alongside this, we work with clients to think through solid analytics strategies. This step instills a data-centric culture from the start, setting the stage for ongoing learning and adaptation. 

By aligning qualitative user insights with a framework for quantitative data capture, we ensure the product strategy we craft will continually evolve to meet user needs.

As we pivot to the alpha and beta stages, the emphasis turns to iterative improvement. We engage early adopters in testing programs. Their first-hand experiences provides invaluable feedback to detect bugs and potential enhancements. 

This feedback, bolstered by real-time analytics data, drives our evidence-based refinement process, prepping the product to be market-fit.

By investing in this cycle of continuous learning — persistent testing, data-informed analytics, and strategic iteration — we embrace a user-centric ethos in product development. This equips our clients to not just navigate, but also thrive.

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When Ravi Mehta (former CPO at Tinder/Product Director at Facebook) was working on the first iteration of his personalized coaching product, he validated it quickly with a paid offering he pieced together with a number of low-code tools.

Leveraging learnings from a community of early adopters, he partnered with MetaLab to help enhance, refine, and evolve the product into the Outpace app.

Outpace launched earlier this year. It provides guided programs for personalized career development designed to level up with the support of a one-on-one AI coach.

We are in a post-WeWork/Theranos era of founders promising growth without showing any profit. You need to ask yourself "What do we need to show investors?" Users are great, but how is this actually going to make money?

You have to show real numbers and an actionable monetization strategy. This means outlining your marketing and growth strategies — and the mechanisms that will bring in not only revenue but profit.

Revenue strategies can vary greatly, but the following are a few of the most common buckets of digital product monetization mechanisms:

There are many ways to monetize a product, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. The right way is the one that will resonate with your audience, so feel free to experiment and be flexible when choosing a strategy.

We’ve been supporting Modular with the release of their new AI platform and product offerings. Early in our engagement, they asked us to design a marketing site to help them grow and segment their sales pipeline. This allowed them better understand, and target, existing and potential users. We took those early learnings to ensure the product landed with their audience and supported their revenue targets.

The product lifecycle doesn’t end with a launch, it goes far beyond. Once you begin to get a better understanding of your customers and their purchase behaviours, it’s vital to adapt, being flexible with pricing, monetization strategies, and identifying unexpected revenue drivers. 

For example, you may see that your primary offering for your SaaS tool is slowly gaining traction, but over and over customers are requesting access to an API for a specific data flow. You may be sitting on a large additional untapped revenue stream and there could be more. Meet your customers where they are!

It helps to consult the people who’ve been there before. There are a million people on LinkedIn who are trying to sell you a service or product that you may not need. There are critical steps that could cost you if you miss them. There are shortcuts you may not even know exist. Trusted advisors can help you navigate this and more. There is just no substitute for experience.

Find seasoned product leaders, designers, or engineers who have launched products in the past and will be familiar with the nitty-gritty details. They will have the perspective to help you find the forest through the trees. You want people on your side who can make sure you are spending your time, efforts, and money on the right things.

These are the Product Survival Kit items that we recommend to anyone who is creating and launching a product in today's climate. It's a mix of techniques, processes, people, actions and tools that we've seen provide success to many of our clients, colleagues and partners out there. But remember — each product is different, so find the mix that worst best for you. 

It may seem daunting but it is possible to successfully bring your idea or product concept to life today.  This may even be the right moment to go after it. Companies who launch useful and impactful products during economic downturns have a history of surviving and thriving. The next one could be you.