Design Process
Although I tend to see the so called “Design Process” on almost every designer’s portfolio, this can be quite misleading. This design process is a hypothetical series of steps which can be achieved usually in ideal working conditions. However, being aware of all the UX processes and tools out there gives me the option to know which ones to choose depending on the project requirements.
01
Defining requirements
I see this as the most important step in the process. There is nothing worse than spending a lot of effort getting all the design details right while solving the wrong problem. So this is the step where I ask a lot of questions in order to define the general business needs, requirements for the project, understand deliverables, timeline and stakeholder’s expectations.
02
Problem discovery
During this phase, I collect information, talk to people and explore the problem. This is where I conduct internal and/or external interviews with users. If user research isn’t within the budget, then I try to find relevant UX research papers. This phase also includes gathering any analytics that may exist about the problem as well as doing competitive analysis.
03
Results analysis
In this phase I’m going through all the gathered knowledge from the previous step to define the users, their needs and pain points. On top of that, personas, user flows and user journeys will be created to get a better understanding of all the processes involved. This is also a great time to define the measures of success and goals.
04
Solutions ideation
This is where I go through all the iterations needed to generate ideas. I try to bring other stakeholders like product people or developers to an ideation session to help with feasibility advice and exploring options from different perspectives. This will usually involve creating wireframes and sometimes low fidelity prototypes.
05
Hi-fi designs
During this process, I take the best solutions from the previous step and create hi-fi, ready-for-dev designs where I add branding and make them cool. Once I have these designs, I start using them to create an interactive prototype. This can be hotpoints only or as close to real-world as possible, depending on the requirements.
06
Testing and iterating
In this phase I test the prototype with the existing users or potential users. In some cases, where cost is an issue, I appeal to the employees of the company or friends if they are meeting the user criteria. Based on the results of theses test, I can either go back to one of the previous phases or prepare the designs for development.
07
Quality assurance
Based on my experience, the job of the designer should not be done when they do the handover to the dev team. The job is done when the feature or product is released and used by the users. This will need close review of tickets done to ensure design accuracy.