The questions UX designers should ask during a kick-off meeting

Asking the right questions early in the process will set you up for success. It is important to fully understand the challenge, the current understanding (biases), and to ensure usability is thought about on day one. I’ve broken them into 4 key categories.

Objective

The most obvious questions to ask are on the project’s purpose and objective. It enables the team to understand to gain a better understanding of the project, but also allows the team to understand the pitfalls and preferred outcomes from the client.

• What is the objective?
• Why are we focusing on it?
• What is the purpose of the project or task?
• What decisions are you trying to make with the results?
• What would cause this project to fail?
• How much time do we have?

How will success be measured?

Giving the team a target and determining if a project has made progress towards it is key to understanding the success of a team, process, and ultimately the project. Asking these questions will help designers better focus their research and exploration.

• How will we define success?
• What is the ideal outcome for you?
• What KPIs are we hoping to impact?
• What are we aiming to achieve?
• What is the KPI’s current average?

Who is our customer?

As designers, it’s our job to balance the business’s goals with our users. To champion the user and provide them with the best product experiences through empathy and research. By finding out the team’s assumptions on the users and their problems we can validate and better guide the project forward through research and user testing.

• Who are the users/customers?
• What problems are we solving? (Are these problems worth solving? How many users do they affect)
• Are we looking at new or existing customers? or both?
• Do we need to consider multiple cultures?

Design & accessibility

A kick-off meeting is a good time to get the design cogs churning. Try to understand the existing or expected products process/journey.

Set ground rules early, this is critical to an accessible product, don’t accept “we will come back to it” because teams never do… Define the devices, software and hardware the customers use, include users who have an impediment whether that be physical or mental. Then take these guidelines and ensure every developer and tester task has it as a checklist to pass.

• What tasks are critical to accomplish?
• Which devices & versions should be supported? (mobiles, tablets, laptops, desktops, TVs, watches, etc.)
• Which software & versions should be supported? (screen readers, browsers, etc.)
• Which hardware & versions should be supported? (mouse, keyboard, braille display, camera, etc.)

Research

Don’t perform your research in a vacuum, try to answer questions the team has not just your own. Your team is more likely to appreciate the effort and act upon the results of their questions are also addressed. Identify project biases, answers that the team wants to be true. As a team discuss which research methods to use based on time, budget, and goals.

• What questions do you need to answer?
• What types of answers are you expecting?
• Do we need quantitative or qualitative data? or both? (how are we going to collect this data)
• How do we verify the accuracy of the data?