The Benefit of Design Processes

Design Processes seem daunting sometimes but they don’t have to be. When broken down, they become more manageable and will greatly benefit your end result. When thinking of designing a product, it is easy to want to jump right into the aesthetic design but lets take a few steps back. We will talk about a few preliminary steps in the design process: Personas, Concept Models and Site Maps.

First, personas. They may seem pointless, but these will honestly set the stage for the rest of your design. Ultimately your design will have some purpose for other users. If they don’t benefit from it, then what’s the point? I is imperative that you know who your audience is and what they need. Personas help you do that. They are mock personal profiles that define a person’s needs, interested, and experience. Using them will help you focus on the purpose of your design, whether it be a website, app, or other product.

Here are some things that personas include: A title, a quote, short bio, characteristics, goals, and frustrations points. These elements can help you get to know your audience. Creating a few different personas will also help expand your thinking. Instead of designing for yourself, you will be designing for your personas and their needs.

One of my projects was designing a knowledge base website for a Digital Media Program for students and professors. Here are the personas that were designed:

This is a profile for a potential student who would use the knowledge base website. The details of his needs and experience are outlined so you can clearly see what type of website he would need. There were a couple other personas designed for a senior student and a professor.

Now that you have a clear goal of who to design for now it’s time to start designing ideas, using a concept model. This will help you get ideas on paper and start organizing your persona’s needs and actions they may take throughout their experience.

Concept models are abstract free-form designs that help you organize the different relationsips between personas, actions, functions, content, etc. Their basic design involves circles for any nouns and connected with verbs using arrows. Here are a couple examples:

You can see how the personas are use to help define different attributes of the process and distinguish the relationship between the different aspects of the site.

These may seem like too many steps but we are only going to talk about one more: site maps. They are great ways to help you start your initial design. Now that you have your purpose from your personas and ideas from your concept model, you can now start deciding how the persona’s problems will be solved by the ideas using a site map. It is basically a skeleton or layout of the different pages of a site. It shows the relationship between the pages and possibly some functionality that will be unique to each.

The post-it notes are a great place to start. You can move them around, use different colors and try a few arrangements to help get your ideas solidified. Then using another program, you can create a vector based image (like the concept model), to give more clarity.

With these three elements, personas, concept models and site maps, you can see much more of a purpose to the design. We are able to understand specific needs and problems that users may face. We can map out how different elements will relate to eahc other using a concept model. And we can start to build the basic layout of the map for your site. With these things, it will be much easier to start designing the more aesthetic elements of your design like wireframes and specific content. Your design will have much more purpose and reasoning behind them rather than just looking really pretty. Make your designs matter. Make them useful.

Lauren Madsen is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. The following article relates to the Design Guide project in the DGM 2250 Course and representative of the skills learned.