UX DESIGN PROCESS
By: Ogunleye Nathaniel
Tags: UX Design, UX Research, Ui Ux Design, Product Design, UX

In the past few years of designing digital products, I have realize that having a well defined process for creating user centered designs is essential. So decided to write a brief overview of UX design process to help designers who are just getting started with UX design. Enough of the chitchat, lets get into it.

Illustration by Natasha Remarchuk from Icons8

Step 1: Understanding

Before starting a project, you need to be aware of two things:

User: What problems is the user facing? Once you can identify the problems and obstacles, then you can start to work towards the solutions. Brand: Understanding the brand/company and how the project you are working on align with the company mission and goals. To summarize, at this stage you need to determine and find alignment between the user and brand/company interests. This will help you understand and choose the right direction.

Step 2: Research

As a designer, you might have a ton of assumptions about that user want or doesn’t want in a design. You need to conduct UX research methods to find the right answers.

1:1 Interviews: A 1:1 interview is when the interviewer asks a participant a series of questions about behavior, preferences, attitudes, and experiences on a topic or item of interest.

A 1:1 interview is when the interviewer asks a participant a series of questions about behavior, preferences, attitudes, and experiences on a topic or item of interest. Focus Groups: A focus group is small. group of people whose reaction are studied especially in market research in guided or open discussions about a product.

A focus group is small. group of people whose reaction are studied especially in market research in guided or open discussions about a product. Usability Testing: Usability testing is a technique used in user-centered interaction design to evaluate a product by testing it on users. This can be seen as a usability practice since it gives direct input on how users use the system.

These are just a few methods that make your assumption to make as real tangible evidence. You don’t need a million of users, finding 3–5 users in your target audience will be enough.

Step 3: Analyze all data

When you’ve done all the research, you can take all that data and start working with it. One way to layout your research is to make a user persona. It will act as a guide when it comes to making all of your design decisions, if you ever get stuck you can always look back to the persona to figure out the user’s needs.

And if you need a wider view of the big picture journey that your user take, try the user journey map

User journey map: Creating a user journey map can help you understand what the user will be going through when they interact with the product or service, this can give great insights of pain points and how to restructure them before moving into the next stage.

Step 4: Design Process

In this stage, you actually build a design;

Sitemaps

Wireframes

Userflows

High fidelity design

For more details on the design thinking process, visit this link

Step 5: Launch a Product

After design and redesigning, you start collaborating with the development team to turn your carefully crafted design into a real working product. UX is everyone’s job, and it’s only getting better with collaboration.