Adventure Venture: Illustrating the Stages of UX Design

Like many user experience designers, I follow a version of the User-Centred Design process in my work. Its central tenets are that understanding user needs is a crucial first step to designing good products, and that users should be involved in all stages of the design process.

An increasing number of companies understand the value of this approach, but not all are convinced that it is possible to follow it properly and still fit within time and budgetary constraints, nor that they can accomplish all this without hiring an army of researchers, designers and graphic artists.

In this series of posts I illustrate this process in action with only one UX professional: myself. I will conduct every step of the process in a particular domain, culminating with a design solution:

• Problem statement and competitor analysis
• Requirements gathering and user research
  (Questionnaire design, research ethics)
• Research interpretation and job stories
  (Emergent coding, Jobs-to-be-done framework)
• Ideation and low-fidelity sketch
  (Crazy Eights ideation technique, Moqups)
• Initial prototype and usability testing
  (Javascript / JQuery / HTML / CSS / Skeleton)
• High-fidelity mockup
  (Sketch)
• Final prototype
  (Django / InVision)