A beginners guide to UX techniques, methods and processes.

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

UX or User Experience Design (as it’s name sounds) is designing solutions for a product whose goal is to enhance the user’s interaction experiences.

The process differs for everyone but is on the same plane of asking questions and finding answers. UX designers shape their process through a lot of practiced design thinking and focusing on solving exclusively for the user.

A typical textbook process follows this pattern:

Empathise -> Define -> Ideate -> Prototype -> Test

Discover Context -> Explore Solutions -> Test your Solutions -> Keep Listening for feedback — Neilsen group

UX Research Cheat Sheet

And all the other frameworks are essentially the same person in different costumes.

So let me take a ticket and reword it, very simply: the process in a nutshell,

The typical UX process @niacin

UXD believes, there mustn’t be any form of approach that doesn’t involve the user. Any product created is created for someone to consume or use.

Would you give an unpeeled orange to a toddler and expect them to eat, or would you peel it for them?

I . Problem Phase

“Figuring out and understanding the problem is 3/4th of the battle”

1. Understanding the problem -

First, we need to know what needs solving. From learning the stakeholder’s expectations, the business context and the environment, we can draw up a ‘problem hypothesis’. A prior problem statement before going to the real users, including laying down the performance KPIs and the scope, to concentrate resources better.

Techniques & methods- -

• Competitive analysis,
• secondary research,
• business history,
• industry analysis,
• KPIs,
• Eco system map

2. Understanding the users —

— Empathise — an already established perfect concept for getting to understand the user deep. How they live, what they have seen, experienced, their preferences, behaviours and choices.

This can be further subdivided into learning about the user and drawing up insights.

(i) Learning about the user — ‘Step into the wonderful world of user research. Where you think you know someone, but have a high chance of completely surprising you’

Asking in-depth questions about the user’s thought processes or getting even a guerrilla type quantitative surveys can tell designers valuable insights into the user’s world and a glimpse of how they’ll use the product. Thus helping in solving and designing expertly for the user.

Techniques for user research — — -

• ethnography study,
• contextual inquiry,
• survey,
• interviews,
• observations,
• focus groups,
• field study

(ii) Insight derivation and further understanding use gaps —

After talking to the potential users, we have to synthesis all those information, to be used well. To help insight derivation and further focus on the user to build solutions,

some techniques are widely used by the UX community

• Empathy maps,
• Persona,
• user story ,
• user journey,
• case and user scenarios

3. Finalising the problem — defining the problemo

From all the insight derivation, analysis, understanding and synthesising, the designer can finally put down the exact problem that they are solving, with the why, again, focusing on the user.

The guiding problem statement is arrived at.

Problem Statement Template

II. Solution Phase — ideating

4. Figuring out the solution —

This is the time to put on the thinking caps, where the designer’s creative dam is expected to be opened, where no idea is bad. All that is wanted is a simple but all encompassing solution. (or just a simple problem identification — solution, whatever works) This is where the magic of diverse thinking comes in and situations are looked at from differing angles. The designers (ideally) strive and work their brains for the best possible solution.

Techniques for (out of the box ) generating solutions —

• Brainstorming,
• Crazy Eights,
• HMW (How Might We)

5. Building the solution-

After figuring out a solution to build on, the designers start to put together/organise the elements to form basic skeletons and structures, and go on to create prototypes, to see what works and what doesn’t.

While doing this designers may seek the help of these techniques —

• Value proposition ,
• Card sorting,
• Story boarding
• First click testing
• Site map, (helps IA building)
• User flows,
• Heuristic evaluation,
• Wire-framing,
• Interactive low and high fidelity prototypes

When these prototypes are iterated upon feedbacks, a single complete solution is pushed to test , (you guessed it), through the users.

When the product proves the point, maybe after some tweaks of feedback implementation, it’s ready for launch. Otherwise back to the drawing board.

III. Launch Phase

6. Test & Launch

(i) Usability tests. The most nerve racking, frustrating, yet exciting part of this whole process. The designers get to see if their solution worked and get live reactions (with moderated study) from the users. They very carefully sort out the feedback, again draw insights and implement changes to make the product better and be more ‘user-friendly’.

Techniques used to sort and derive insights—

• Affinity mapping,
• Feedback observation sheet,
• Insight template, (The problem and the cause)
• Priority mapping (P0, P1, P2 insights, P0 being urgent)

Then, when the solution meets the problem expectations of the user, it is launched!

(ii) Post launch research —
The process continues, as the designers keep track of the users on how they are using the product, to create even better product experiences.

Techniques used —

• Heat maps,
• Eye tracking,
• A/B testing,
• Session tracking

When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods

This article is meant to introduce the ux process and give a very birds eye view of the methods used to achieve the results.

If you know other techniques, do comment down below, to be added here!