UX Design Process 101
UX has become one of the most used terms in the tech industry, with many companies setting out to hire their very own UX designers, researchers, or a hybrid of both. But we noticed that for some clients there’s still uncertainty as to what is UX, let alone what a UX designer can do for their product. In this article, I’ll shed some light to clear it up and also mention why UX design is important to ensure the success of a product in the market. Let’s start with its definition before diving in the details.
Defining UX
UX simply stands for user experience. It’s the design of a product or service that takes business goals, design patterns and best practices, and the needs of the users to basically deliver the best for the ones who will be using the product. Throughout the design process, a UX Designer has to constantly think of how the user will feel while interacting with it.
Or as Donald Norman, a former VP at Apple, coined the term “user experience” in the early days of Apple. It seems that he invented the term and explains it as “… I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system, including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual.”
Top reasons why UX is important
Great user experience can quite simply be the difference between a customer choosing your product or service, and not. If a user comes across your platform and their needs are fulfilled in a pleasant way, they are likely to stay and even become advocates of it.
In a nutshell, good UX equates to:
- More customers
- Better loyalty
- Longer customer lifecycle
- Greater likelihood of a recommendation
- Willingness to forgive mistakes
The UX design process in five simple steps
Step 1: understanding the context and audience
Never underestimate the importance of context before kicking off a project. At the very start, we always have a call with the client to seek answers to the following questions:
- What is the goal of the project?
- How will the client personally define project success?
- What are the user needs?
- How does this compare to the business needs?
- What design and experience vision does the client already have in mind?
- What challenges or issues will the experience solve for its users?
After capturing and discussing the answers we receive, we continue to the second stage of the process, which is user research.
Step 2: user research
This is probably the most important step throughout the entire process. User research will shed light on the client’s users, their behaviour, goals, motivations, and need. It also allows us to understand their views on other similar products making it possible to understand the good and bad design patterns.
There are various ways of conducting user research, both qualitative and quantitative and we would often recommend using a mix of different techniques. It’s important to mark the distinction between listening to users and observing users. Both methods have their place in research, and both will provide you with valuable data.
In-depth interviews (IDIs): these are one-to-one interviews with specific users of our client’s product who belong to the target demographic. They are usually most useful in trying to uncover the underlying needs and desires of the user when interacting with the product.
Pro-tip for IDIs: always phrase your questions as open-ended to get as wide of an answer as possible.
Online surveys: These should consist of a sample of questions sent to your target audience. It is often useful to do this having already conducted the IDIs, which will enable you to more thoroughly frame your questions. However, be careful not to use leading questions which could skew your results.
Focus groups: These normally consist of a group of around five target users led by a UX lead. Such groups enable your target users to interact and discuss their thoughts and frustrations with the product in question among themselves. Focus groups are a natural way of tracking the conversation without the use of specific questions. These are much more of a discussion than an interview.
Usability testing: Unlike the previous three research methods discussed, usability testing is specifically about uncovering product usability issues. It enables the UX designer to observe the product being used, where the functionality is tested. It’s also very useful in uncovering any additional feedback that a user might encounter with the product.
Step 3: ready to start designing
Now comes the best part: designing the solution with the user’s feedback. This involves creating the first iteration of your new product, which can be anything from an initial sketch, through to a full working prototype.
Wireframing and prototyping: Wireframes and prototypes give you a real, tangible object to test on your target demographic. When it comes to digital products, the more operational your prototype, the more detail the tests are that you can later conduct. When it comes to mobile apps, you can find a useful comparison of different types of prototypes here.
Why are wireframes useful? In a digital product such as a web or a mobile app, wireframes are like the skeletons of pages that you want to design. They display all the basic, but essential features of the page, such as the functionality, the content architecture and the pathways between different pages.
Similar to a user journey map, it gives a useful overview of how users’ will ultimately experience your product.
The process of wireframing helps UX leads to present different ways of displaying content and prioritizing it in order to best suit the needs of the user, their expectations, and their goals. Wireframing ultimately prepares the UX team for prototyping.
Note that wireframes should not contain detailed descriptions or design details. At this stage, it’s important to get the bare bones of the product right before starting the UI designs.
What does prototyping involve?
Once you’ve completed your wireframes, the next step is prototyping. This is the creation of an early version of your final product with all the basic functionality in place. It is vitally important in enabling you to check all the usability before you’ve spent any money on actual full web development and design. Your prototype better enables you to see the intentions between different product elements and enables the UX team to see how the overall design will work together and repair any inconsistencies or errors.
When is a Prototype App right for you?
- If you want to test your product — A prototype app can give you clarity about whether your vision works and what might need adapting. It can often save a significant amount of development cost further down the line.
- If you’re seeking funding — A prototype can be highly useful when it comes to demonstrating a product to investors and prospective shareholders.
- If you’re looking to iterate quickly — A prototype enables you to cycle through several drafts before developing your software, which can save time and money in the long run.
Step 4: product launch
After the UI designers complete the task of translating the wireframes to full UI designs, we’re ready to pass everything to the development team in order to build the working version of your product. But this is by no means the end of your journey!
Conduct a beta launch. This is a limited release of your product to a small number of target users with the goal of finding issues and cleaning them up before you launch it to the world.
Perform user testing to see how your target audience reacts to the product and whether there’s anything that you might have missed during your initial research phase.
At this stage it’s worth asking the following questions:
- Is the product solving the user’s challenges?
- Does it perform in a way that is intuitive to the user?
- Are there any elements which could be simplified?
- Are there any areas for improvement?
Test, test and test some more: As your internal testers to perform all the much-needed tests of functionality to ensure that there are no bugs in the system in time for launch. At 10Clouds, we have a whole team dedicated to exactly this.
Step 5: further analysis
Post-launch, when the product, in its full version goes out into the world, it’s time to analyze the process that you went through.
Why? By thoroughly analyzing the product and the UX process, you’ll be able to gain long-term insights about your business and its target audience that you’ll use in the future, beyond the launch of the specific product that has just been created.
Refine your process: Every company’s process will be unique to its context and target demographic. So it might well be worth your time conducting a full analysis of what worked, what didn’t and what you might change the next time that you conduct a UX process.
What’s your experience with explaining what UX Design is and why it’s important? Share your thoughts in the comments. And if you have a better way to explain it, I wanna hear about it! 😉
Also, a big shout out to Ewa Józefkowicz for the immense help with this article. ❤️
