Prioritization Canvas
Prioritization canvases helps your team to get a common understanding of where to spend time and focus when developing solutions and sorting research findings.
Prioritization canvases can also be a good supporting tool when measuring and following up the effect of the solutions being developed. These methods can be easily combined with voting mechanics within the team or with customers.
In a nutshell
Time
1 – 4 hours
Participants
– Project team
– Decision maker
Materials
– Post-its
– Pens
– Whiteboard, whiteboard paper or wall
Learning materials
Build the right things! (internal training)
Importance/Difficulty matrix template (Mural)
Using Prioritization Matrices to Inform UX Decisions (article) – Nielsen Norman Group
Working on what matters most (article) – Cogent
PREPARE
Prepare all the “things” that you will put on the canvas. They should be similar by nature. For example issues to fix, new features, usability findings, new business opportunities etc.
DURING
Create your canvas on whitepaper or whiteboard. You can use any axis you want, but one useful is to add impact on the vertical axis and effort on the horizontal axis. Then divide the canvas to four areas through the middle.
Start prioritizing! Now you have four field and you can start adding your “things” in these four boxes.
The four boxes are Low effort & High impact (YES), High effort & High impact (SOMETIMES), Low effort & Low impact (MAYBE), High effort & Low impact (NO).
Prioritize your YES box. Now if you still have many things in the YES box, you can clear the canvas and add only those in the four boxes to be compared to each other, so you can narrow it down to get the best picks!
