Step 5. Design Process

Published in

Mastering UX

5 min readApr 5, 2017

Master UX in 15 steps.📍 Start

There are a lot of techniques and tools in a UX toolkit. A designers’ job is to choose the most suitable tools for a particular project depending on a scope, requirements and limitations.

UX Process Step by Step in 50 minutes

This is the best video about UX. You’ll learn the general process of UX design, popular methods, and examples of user experience that are so much more than just beautiful screens.

The Fundamentals of User Experience (47 mins)
Amanda Morrow on BitMethod Des Moines

To be able to plan an effective design process, it’s crucial to already have a sound overview of the process and to be familiar with available tools and best practices.

Research

The first step is to understand the project: ask questions, talk to users and people involved in the project, define problems, understand requirements and restrictions, analyse existing solutions and define scope.

Ultimately, the goal is to answer these questions:

What problem are we trying to solve?
What is our goal?
Who needs to be considered? (users, customers, stakeholders, colleagues)
What has been done thus far?
How much time and effort will it take?
How will we know if we have succeeded?
and many others…

Airbnb user journey. Instead of writing x-page long report you can draw users journeys to present a project

Analisys

This step involves analyzing and reworking data found during research and interviews. The goal is to organise the findings and assumptions so everyone involved in the project can comprehend the data, contribute feedback and start working on the project as swiftly as possible.

Deliverables: user personas, use cases, user flows, mental models, journey maps or storyboards.

Information Architecture

This step requires defining the best way to organize the information, researching the words your customers use to make labels, and ultimately creating navigation and user flow.

The goal is to make sure users can find the information they are looking for and can navigate easily through the site.

Platforma Flowcharts. It’s important to understand the flow of users through the site.

Deliverables: user flows, sitemaps, navigation, hierarchy, labels, red routs.

Prototype

In this step, you create testable layouts to see if your idea works. Doing this now eradicates the risk of wasting time on polishing design and pairing fonts (you’ll have time to do this later). Prototypes help to focus on the structure and functionality of the site instead of visual elements.

The goal is to test your ideas early on in the process, gather user feedback, improve the interface and save time and effort on developing useless features.

Paper prototypes help test interfaces quickly. Photo: Stefan Regehr

Deliverables: paper prototypes, wireframes, mock-ups, interactive prototypes.

User Interface Design

In this step, you create look and feel of the site, visual hierarchy, choose fonts, colours, images and finalise layouts.

When making things, we should aim to give equal attention to looking good and being good. If either side of that duality fails, the whole suffers. 📖 How to Make Sense of Any Mess by

The goal is to create an interface that communicates your ideas, guides users and accentuates target content.

Deliverables: mood boards, mock-ups, design files, style guides or pattern libraries.

Finalize

50% of a developer’s salary is wasted on fixing errors that a UX design process would have weeded out

Important and often overlooked step in design process is launching the product. Designers goal is to help developers better understand project and create hand-off materials.

The goal is save time and collaborate more effectively.

Deliverables: documentations, specifications, design files (InVision, Sketch, PS), images, presentations.

Improve

Analytic tools and user feedback can give valuable insight and help to find the most pressing usability issues.

The goal is to find what you can improve and what impact your changes make.

When Time is Limited

Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business (34 mins)
Jeff Gothelf on UX Lx

Lean UX is one of the alternative approaches to UX design. The idea behind Lean UX is to improve the product and produce faster by iterating, testing assumptions and getting feedback as early as possible.