Ever felt overwhelmed with the mountain of data during the design process? Wondered how best to prioritize tasks to meet user needs? I'm Dianna Deeney, and this episode of the Quality During Design Podcast promises to guide you through the chaos. We delve deep into the concept of an urgent/important matrix, a simple two-way matrix that can help you align your design priorities based on the user.
We get practical, applying this matrix to a real-world scenario - designing a bicycle stand. As we navigate through preliminary user data, we'll explore how tasks can be categorized based on urgency and importance. From assembling the stand to recycling the packaging materials, high-level tasks are prioritized. Tune in and uncover how you can leverage this straightforward tool to streamline your design process and create products that truly resonate with user requirements.
This is a Quality during Design Redux episode originally titled "Design for User Tasks using an Urgent/Important Matrix". Visit the podcast blog for examples and other links.
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About me Dianna Deeney helps product designers work with their cross-functional team to reduce concept design time and increase product success, using quality and reliability methods.
She consults with businesses to incorporate quality within their product development processes. She also coaches individuals in using Quality during Design for their projects.
She founded Quality during Design through her company Deeney Enterprises, LLC. Her vision is a world of products that are easy to use, dependable, and safe – possible by using Quality during Design engineering and product development.
Dianna Deeney:
Hello, it's Dianna Deeney. We've been talking about technical communication during design engineering. Engineers both create documents for themselves during the design process for the design history file to communicate with the test lab to report on results even technical communication. As we're designing a product, we're also considering the steps users are going to take with our product and considering what we need to communicate to them. Sometimes there is so much information that we have a hard time deciphering what is a priority and what is not a priority. A place that we can get started is with a urgent, important matrix. We take this matrix out of personal task prioritization and move it into a design activity to help us prioritize what's important for the user, what we need to communicate, what we need to design for.
Dianna Deeney:
I'm pulling this episode from the Quality During Design Podcast archives. It was originally titled "Design for User Tasks Using an Urgent, important Matrix. In this episode we talk more about this matrix and we talk through an example of how we can use it to evaluate user tasks. So listen in and figure out how to use a simple two-way matrix to prioritize things for design. Enjoy. We've collected all sorts of preliminary information about our users that we're using for a new product design, we may be faced with so much data we're not sure where to turn first or what design feature is a priority. There's a simple, two-way matrix we can use to help us sort it all out an urgent, important matrix. We may have used it to prioritize tasks for ourselves or as a management strategy for our team, but we can also use it to evaluate the tasks our users take when using our product. There's more after this brief introduction. Hello and welcome to Quality During Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products others love for less. My name is Diana. I'm a senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design. Listen in and then join the conversation at QualityDuringDesigncom.
Dianna Deeney:
An urgent, important matrix is a simple, two-way matrix with four window panes or buckets. It's not solely a quality tool, but it can be a tool to prioritize quality type decisions. It's deceptively simple, so much so that we might dismiss it, but the real work of it is actually trying to fill one out. Have you ever tried to fill out an urgent, important matrix? It forces us to stop, think and evaluate tasks from different angles. If we're designing based with input that needs our attention, we can use an urgent, important matrix to help us prioritize, highlight and even strike some tasks off our list. I'll include a graphic of an urgent, important matrix on the podcast blog To use this matrix. Here's how we think of urgent and important.
Dianna Deeney:
Urgent tasks demand attention because the consequences of not dealing with them are immediate. These tend to be reactive, with a narrow focus, but they don't need to be. Important tasks contribute to long-term missions and goals. These can be proactive. Our outputs to using this matrix is that tasks are going to be labeled in one of four ways. They need to be done. They should be omitted or deleted. They can be delegated to someone or something else, or there's a decision needed about when to get them done before they become emergencies.
Dianna Deeney:
There are four pains or buckets that make up this matrix. The urgent and important pain is what we want to do right away. These can be looked at as crises, complaints or breakdowns. We don't want a long list here. The not urgent and not important pain, on the other hand, is what we want to delete. They're distractions, so let's get rid of them. The type of activities that can cause us to procrastinate are types of things that we'll list here Now. If it's urgent and not important. These are things that need to get done and keep us busy, but they're not contributing to our long-term goals. For these, can we delegate them to someone else to do? Ideally, we'd want to delegate to someone who considers this task to be urgent and important to them. Finally, if it's not urgent but important, these are tasks that will get us to our long-term goals, but they're not yet urgent. We're going to decide how to get these done so they don't shift into the urgent section of our matrix. This is the pain of the matrix that we want to plan around to ensure that it gets done.
Dianna Deeney:
How can we use this tool for design? Say, we're developing a new product. We've done some initial usability engineering studies, so we've talked with potential users and have feedback. Let's put ourselves in our customers' shoes. Their tasks are those that take time for them to complete. Out of all the potential ways our customers could use our product, which tasks are considered urgent or the tasks that they need to immediately address and that our product will solve? What tasks are considered important that helps them reach their long-term goals? Are their tasks are performing that are unnecessary, that our design may be able to eliminate? Are there any tasks that they do now. That doesn't help with their long-term wants.
Dianna Deeney:
Let's step through an example. We're developing a bicycle stand. Our target users are individual adults that need a bicycle storage solution inside their apartment or home. From surveys and focus groups, our users say they want a stand to free up floor space in their living area, to secure the bike from falling and getting damaged, to have easy access to the bikes so they can grab it and go places, and to display their price bicycle in a nice way. We've determined that our users will place the stand inside their living areas, like a living room, foyer or bedroom, and that some of them live with small children and pets. They need to assemble and secure the stand to a wall, adjust the stand to fit their bike store and display their bike on it, remove the bike for riding, recycle packaging materials and finally, disassemble the stand for moving or disposal. Remember that we can use process flows or flow charts to help us capture all the steps and tasks that our users take with our product.
Dianna Deeney:
Understanding our users' tasks, what is urgent and important to our users? Remember that urgent tasks demand attention because the consequences of not dealing with them are immediate. Important tasks contribute to long-term missions and goals, and urgent and important task for our scenario is assembling and securing the stand. If our users do this step incorrectly, the bicycle may tip and fall and it could make the stand not sturdy, which could harm anything or anyone else in the living area, like children, pets or roommates, and cause damage to the bike. Not being able to assemble the stand is going to frustrate our users and will get complaints about it. The consequences of the user task assembling and securing the stand are immediate and important to long-term goals.
Dianna Deeney:
We would want to ensure that we created a design with assembly and securement in mind and that we made it easy for our users to complete this step. Being able to store and display the bike right away and then remove it for riding could also be urgent and important tasks to our users. That's why they bought our stand. We wouldn't want a design that made them glue or clamp the stand pieces together, making them wait to use the bike for another week while it cured. They'd want to use it right away. This is another feature of our design that we could focus on immediate use after assembly.
Dianna Deeney:
The not urgent and not important task could be recycling the packaging materials. This task doesn't need to get done right away and is not important to be able to use the stand. We generally want to delete these sort of tasks. We could design packaging to minimize the number of different materials to recycle, perhaps focusing all on cardboard packaging instead of a mix of cardboard, plastic and foam For the things that are urgent and not important. Remember, these are tasks that need to get done and keep us busy, but they're not contributing to our long-term goals.
Dianna Deeney:
Completing and submitting warranty information may need to be done within 30 days of purchase, but it's not important to the user to be able to use the stand for their bicycle. It's urgent, but it's not important to the user For this kind of thing. We'd want to make this step as easy as possible for the user to complete. We can delegate much of the warranty information as we can by partnering with retailers for receipts and allowing users to scan those codes to auto-populate warranty information If it's not urgent but important. These are tasks that will get us to our long-term goals, but they're not yet urgent. Maybe we'll make our bike stand design universal for all bikes, but with some adjustments to be made if the user wanted to position clips to protect their bike finish. If so, then the user task adjust the stand to fit their bike may be considered important to our users but not urgent for them to be able to use the stand right away. Disassembling the stand for moving or disposal could also be a task that's considered not urgent but important. These are things we'll want to plan for our users to be able to do in the future. Perhaps the instructions we package will include the necessary steps for our urgent and important tasks like assembling the bike stand, but then for adjustments by bicycle brand or disassembling instructions. They visit our website There now we have an urgent, important matrix for our design idea based on the tasks our users take to use our product.
Dianna Deeney:
We can prioritize our design options and decisions around the tasks that are urgent and important to our users and try to eliminate those that are not. If we're using this matrix for a design activity, here's some steps we can take with our team. First, get team agreement on the scope and timeframe of the matrix. The timeframe of the matrix can be day, week, month or a year or more. List all of the tasks associated with the scope that take up time. We can do this together as a team or do it individually and pull together the tasks for team review, group the tasks and assign them to a matrix pane or bucket, get rid of duplicates and ensure each task is within scope. Our team can individually prioritize activities and then come together as a group, or we can do it together as a team. Then we take action on the tasks. We can design tasks that are urgent and important. We can make a plan for how to help users complete tasks that are important but not urgent. We continue to work out decisions about the tasks that are urgent but not important, including helping our users delegate to us distributors or other people, and we come up with the right procedure to get rid of those tasks that are not urgent or important. What is today's insight to action? Try using the urgent, important matrix as another tool. You can use it to think more about your users' tasks. It can help prioritize design decisions, including user interfaces, labeling and customer support, and this can be a first step input into other usability engineering techniques.
Dianna Deeney:
Please visit this podcast blog and others at qualityduringdesigncom. Subscribe to the weekly newsletter to keep in touch. If you like this podcast or have a suggestion for an upcoming episode, let me know. You can find me at qualityduringdesigncom On LinkedIn, or you could leave me a voicemail at 484-341-0238. This has been a production of Deeney Enterprises. Thanks for listening.