100 THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT DESIGN  |  JUNE 22, 2020

100 THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT DESIGN
JUNE 22, 2020

4. My UX Design process

4. My UX Design Process

UX isn't a single step and it's certainly more than opening up your laptop and knocking out wireframes. As I mentioned in my previous post on What is UX Design, UX Design is a process. It's a series of steps that you go through to create wildly successful products.

The process that follows is my own personal approach to UX Design. It's how I tackle every UX project I work on. It's the design process that I've refined over the last eight years. Enough hype though. Let's look at the process.

UX isn't a single step and it's certainly more than opening up your laptop and knocking out wireframes. As I mentioned in my previous post on What is UX Design, UX Design is a process. It's a series of steps that you go through to create wildly successful products.

The process that follows is my own personal approach to UX Design. It's how I tackle every UX project I work on. It's the design process that I've refined over the last eight years. Enough hype though. Let's look at the process.

My UX Design process is divided into 4 stages:

Research
Design
Test
Deliver

Let's look at each stage, starting with Research.

The research stage is where you set out to learn everything about:
a. the business you're creating the product for
b. the people who will use the product, aka the users

In other words, you're gathering Business Requirements and User Requirements. The techniques for gathering these requirements are the following.

On the Business side:

• Stakeholder Interviews - Interviews with your clients
• Competitive Benchmarking - Gleaning best practices from the competition

On the User side:

• User Interviews - Interviews with your product's users/audience
• Surveys - Questionnaires that help gather qualitative information about users
• Personas - Fictional characters that represent subsets of your users

The next stage is Design

One my favorite stages in the process and perhaps the most fulfilling. The design stage is where the product comes to life. It's where you take all the insights and findings you gathered from Research and use them to create a tangible design. The output of the Design stage⁠—sometimes referred to as deliverables⁠—includes:

• Information Architecture - Organizing content, making it easy to find
• Wireframes - Skeleton or blueprint of the content/functionality of your product
• Prototypes - An interactive demo of your product that you can share with clients and users for testing

Which is good segue in to Test

In the test stage, you validate your designs with users to determine:
a. what they like
b. where they struggle

For me, the test stage is the most important stage in the UX Design Process because it allows you to flag major issues BEFORE the product moves in to UI Design and Development. This is crucial because as the product approaches these later stages, it becomes more difficult (and more expensive) to make changes. Whereas, in wireframes making changes and solving issues is quick and painless. For this very reason, it's important to test early and test often.

What does the testing stage look like? I personally divide it into the following steps:

• Plan - Write a test plan
• Conduct - Test
• Report - Analyze and document your results
• Optimize - Iterate your designs based on the results
  
  

The fourth and final stage is Deliver

This is where you take ALL the the work you've done so far (Research, Design, Testing) and share it with the other teams involved on the project. These teams include UI Designers, Developers, Copywriters, and even your client.

The Deliver stage is key and often overlooked. It's where the important insights and design thinking get handed off to the other teams. Providing them with context and making the work they have to do easier and user-centered. Put simply, what you deliver will help UI Designers design better and Developers code better.

The techniques involved in the Deliver stage include:

• Documentation - Where you package up all your UX Design work so you can share with the other teams
• Quality Assurance & Feedback - Where you make sure your UX work has been implemented correctly by other teams

And that covers it. That's how the proverbial sausage is made. Or tofu for my vegan people. If you're not familiar with the techniques detailed above, I'll be following this post with how-tos and some practical examples.

My UX Design process is divided into 4 stages:

Research
Design
Test
Deliver

Let's look at each stage, starting with Research.

The research stage is where you set out to learn everything about:
a. the business you're creating the product for
b. the people who will use the product, aka the users

In other words, you're gathering Business Requirements and User Requirements. The techniques for gathering these requirements are the following.

On the Business side:

• Stakeholder Interviews - Interviews with your clients
• Competitive Benchmarking - Gleaning best practices from the competition
  

On the User side:

• User Interviews - Interviews with your product's users/audience
• Surveys - Questionnaires that help gather qualitative information about users
• Personas - Fictional characters that represent subsets of your users

The next stage is Design

One my favorite stages in the process and perhaps the most fulfilling. The design stage is where the product comes to life. It's where you take all the insights and findings you gathered from Research and use them to create a tangible design. The output of the Design stage⁠—sometimes referred to as deliverables⁠—includes:

• Information Architecture - Organizing content, making it easy to find
• Wireframes - Skeleton or blueprint of the content/functionality of your product
• Prototypes - An interactive demo of your product that you can share with clients and users for testing
   
  

Which is good segue in to Test

In the test stage, you validate your designs with users to determine:
a. what they like
b. where they struggle

For me, the test stage is the most important stage in the UX Design Process because it allows you to flag major issues BEFORE the product moves in to UI Design and Development. This is crucial because as the product approaches these later stages, it becomes more difficult (and more expensive) to make changes. Whereas, in wireframes making changes and solving issues is quick and painless. For this very reason, it's important to test early and test often.

What does the testing stage look like? I personally divide it into the following steps:

• Plan - Write a test plan
• Conduct - Test
• Report - Analyze and document your results
• Optimize - Iterate your designs based on the results

The fourth and final stage is Deliver

This is where you take ALL the the work you've done so far (Research, Design, Testing) and share it with the other teams involved on the project. These teams include UI Designers, Developers, Copywriters, and even your client.

The Deliver stage is key and often overlooked. It's where the important insights and design thinking get handed off to the other teams. Providing them with context and making the work they have to do easier and user-centered. Put simply, what you deliver will help UI Designers design better and Developers code better.

The techniques involved in the Deliver stage include:

• Documentation - Where you package up all your UX Design work so you can share with the other teams
• Quality Assurance & Feedback - Where you make sure your UX work has been implemented correctly by other teams

And that covers it. That's how the proverbial sausage is made. Or tofu for my vegan people. If you're not familiar with the techniques detailed above, I'll be following this post with how-tos and some practical examples.

Get started with our online UX course.

Get started with our online UX course.