How Designers Can Lead and Drive Experience Optimization Projects

As a designer, beyond supporting daily business needs, overseeing the overall product experience is a crucial part of the role.

Even the best products inevitably encounter various experience problems; when these accumulate, a dedicated "experience optimization project" is needed to resolve them.

Typical triggers include new product launches that focus on functionality but overlook detail, intense competition requiring experience parity, and continuous user feedback during daily operations.

Leading and advancing such a project tests a designer’s comprehensive abilities and is essential for becoming a senior designer, yet few articles cover this topic.

We therefore researched how designers can lead and push experience‑optimization initiatives, summarizing the process into four stages—Define, Find, Solve, Push—and providing a toolkit and real‑world cases for immediate use.

Define Experience Planning Elements

Effective planning must align with product goals and be co‑created with product and engineering teams. The plan should clearly specify five elements: optimization scope, problem acquisition methods, optimization goals, participants, and timeline.

Five Phases of an Experience Optimization Project

The project can be divided into five stages: initiation, problem acquisition, solution generation, requirement implementation, and project review. Each phase requires clear definitions of time, people, tasks, and deliverables.

How to Obtain Experience Problems

Experience problems typically arise from five sources: user research, design reviews, competitor analysis, stakeholder feedback, and product data.

Applying the Methods

These sources can be combined—for example, user feedback about a problematic feature can be validated through design reviews, observed via user testing, analyzed with data, and compared with competitor solutions.

Classifying Issues: Bad Points, Optimization Points, Requirement Points

Bad points are clear experience issues at the user level.

Optimization points are design‑level solutions addressing one or more bad points.

Requirement points are product‑level needs composed of one or more optimization points, representing unmet needs.

Understanding this hierarchy helps transform bad points into optimization points, then into concrete requirements for product planning and implementation.

Questioning Technique to Reveal Bad Points

By continuously asking probing questions, designers can uncover underlying bad points. For instance, a user may request an automatic approval reminder; asking why, when urgency arises, and why a system reminder is preferred reveals the core experience issue.

Deriving Solutions and Converting to Requirements

After classifying problems, designers derive solutions using creative methods and ensure feasibility through collaboration with product and engineering. Solutions are then broken down into specific requirements that enter the product roadmap.

Assessing Optimization Value

Value is evaluated from three perspectives:

Product side : feasibility, alignment with long‑term goals, technical implementability, and resource cost.

User side : impact on core workflows, breadth of affected users, and importance of user roles.

Design side : ROI, demonstration of design professionalism, and enhancement of design influence.

Four Alignment Practices for Successful Delivery

To ensure smooth execution, align on:

Goal alignment: shared objectives across product, design, and engineering.

Progress alignment: regular updates on schedule and risks.

Solution alignment: validation that solutions solve the problem, are technically feasible, and meet acceptance criteria.

Effect alignment: post‑launch evaluation of optimization impact and project retrospectives.

Establishing a Long‑Term Experience Optimization Mechanism

Rather than treating optimization as a one‑off effort, organizations should build a continuous mechanism that includes regular user feedback collection, periodic design reviews, ongoing collaboration with product and engineering to plan optimizations, and systematic retrospectives.