UX PROCESS

I divide my UX Process into 3 phases : 

1. The Research Phase - Pre Production 

• Project Brief
• The First Client Meeting
• User Requirements
• Find out about Competitors (if there are any)
• Existing and Competitor Product Analysis
• Usability Testing on Existing and Competitor Products
• The Problems to be Solved
• Project Outline
• Commercials

2. The Design & Development Phase - The Production

• Further Project Research
• Creating Personas
• Task Models
• UX Navigation Map
• Designing the Information Architecture
• Sketching Ideas
• Designing Wireframes
• Creating a Working Prototype
• Team Testing and Feedback
• User Testing
• Internal Amendments

3. The Testing Phase - Post Production

• Client Testing
• The Second Client Meeting
• Further Amendments - Design & Development
• Team/User Testing
• Final Product

1. Pre - Production

Project Brief

Every project needs some information to begin with. How can I design something if I don’t know what it’s for? If there isn’t a brief, need to ask for one and give questions if necessary to make the brief. A useful brief generally consists information on these subjects:

Description of the project —What is the project to do? The must-haves and must nots.

Business goals, objectives, and expected outcomes—What the organisation expects to gain from the project.

Target audience—Who does the organisation want to be using their new product? The audience information can differ wildly, from age to behavioural differences.

Brand guidelines—Any requirements to convey existing brand personality, such as tone of voice, logos, use of imagery, and so on.

Key stakeholders—Who is our point of contact? Who must we show our findings to?Who must approve our designs?

Expected timings—When must the project be completed by? Are there any deadlines we should know about?

Technological constraints—Are there any technologies the project must use? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the technology?

First Client Meeting

Once we’ve got the brief on our hands, scheduling a client meeting to get the project started is the next step. This is our chance to make sure we’ve fully understood the brief. If there was no formal brief, we make sure to use this kick-off meeting to understand answers to the questions asked previously. This meeting is the perfect time to discuss a project plan and get to know the exact client requirement. It adds the benefit of building a sense of teamwork with your client. Which activities will we be doing when? Can everyone make it to the required dates for delivery and feedback? And, so it goes on.

User Requirements

For remarkable user experiences, we need to understand their needs before we design for them. There are multiple techniques to find out about the user requirements. We must involve real time users interacting with the respective product and to get the desired results. A couple of techniques would be conducting surveys, talking to real time users, doing some contextual research, developing task models, comparing the actual navigation flow of the product with that of the navigation carried out by the user, getting reviews from experts, designing UX maps, product analysis, conducting usability tests and so on. 

Find out about Competitors

Competitor research allows us to understand the features that are present in the competitor's products. This is a good way of understanding users’ expectations and needs. This technique gives both us and our client an in-depth understanding of our competitors in terms of their strengths and weaknesses. This basically allows us to acknowledge and learn from their strengths and make sure that we offer something that lets us benefit from their weaknesses. The importance of this competitor research varies depending on whether our client has an existing product or service which they’re trying to improve upon. It is our responsibility as UX designers to be clear about the methodology and approach we undertake, but we do need input from our client in terms of any specific areas they want us to focus on. Client may want us to focus on specific features or functionality of competitor sites. We should make sure our client understands what the output of this exercise will be and what will it be used for. We can show them previous benchmarks we have done, so they can see what we are focusing on. Once we have their agreement on the end results of the exercise, we can be confident that we are concentrating our efforts in the right areas.

Existing and Competitor Product Analysis

Once we’ve got our hands on the competitor product and the client existing/new product, its necessary we analyse where they stand in terms of overall analytics. Analysis of server statistics can tell us a lot about our users, where they stand and what are they doing now. It can point us to areas where we need to focus on and redesign if necessary. However, analytics don’t tell about the user behaviour, it’s more precisely focused on what the user does on the respective product.

Usability Testing on Existing and Competitor Products

Its necessary we observe our users in real time interacting with existing and competitor products both to find out more about our users’ needs. Its better if conducted in the early stages of the project, since it gives a fair idea about the user requirements and it specifies in which area are we supposed to focus on. It usually happens more than once during the project for various reasons. Its main motive it to improve upon the existing and competitor products and overcome the benchmarked flaws. It plays an incredibly major part in the UX process. It’s the key principle of the user experience design process to keep involving the users every now and then to get valuable feedback and look for opportunities to improve upon the existing product or service. It does give amazing results which one can’t even think of, that is why it is necessary that usability tests run on different kinds of users every now and then to make sure we give them the best user experience. 

The Problems to be Solved

Well, after we’ve conducted tests and gathered information about our users and product, next step would be we sit and discuss the necessary actions to be taken, outline the areas of focus, come up with solutions and techniques to take the project further to its next phase.

Project Outline

Once we have our questions, answers and solutions its time we create a project outline. What steps are to be taken, what all techniques are involved, how long would each process take it complete, for example; wireframes would take about 5 days of time. The fun part about UX is that, there are so many tools and techniques one can use to suit specific project constraints that it’s always possible to involve a user in some or the other way to get to the end result eventually. Different kinds of projects have different project outlines and the method and technology varies. As a UX designer, we must know how to outline projects keeping the client, project and user requirement in mind. A deadline must be set as to which day will the project shall be delivered and make sure we are on time.

Commercials

To end the first phase, last but not the least important, would be setting up the commercial part of the project. Usually when a client is unfamiliar with usability and user centric design, it can be difficult to get the budget you want to, to involve users regularly into the design process. It’s important we sell user centric design to our clients and let them know the benefits of adopting a user centric design approach. I may as well mention a few points : 

1. Better products - A process where end users are involved and the understanding of the commercial objective is obtained, it always results in a better product. 
2. Less Expensive - It’s always cheaper and easier to amend the product in the wireframe stage than making amendments after the product is launched.
3. Less Risk - A user centric design approach definitely helps in fixing certain design and development issues in the early stage of the product, resulting in low failure risks after the product is launched.
4. Quick - UCD process speeds up the product development, since involving users solves quiet a number of problems, it reduces the amount of time spent on doing amendments. 
5. Deeper Understanding - Involving users gives an in depth understanding of the product, helps us discover new opportunities and gain competitive advantages. It’s more of a research-led approach towards design than just blindly designing a product without any deeper understanding.
6. Spreads like fire - An authentic UCD approached project is extremely user friendly and once users gets hands on it, it spreads like fire in the market, making it extremely beneficial for the product and it lets the user decide how he wants to use the app and he would be able to give suggestions freely that would help us making decisions and get the project moving again.
7. Makes more money - UCD approach, apart from concentrating on the users’ needs, it specifically focusses on the design of the product, the look and feel of it, something which achieves a commercial objective. An appealing interface which is easy to navigate definitely makes the user spend more time on the product which leads to making more money. 

2. Production

Further Project Research 

It often involves an in depth understanding of multiple features and functionality of the product we are willing inculcate. Studying the User requirements in depth and developing case studies on the various usability tests we run. The desired result of this further project research would be coming to a stage where we are ready to visualise our ideas on paper and bring it to life. 

Creating Task Models

A task model is a brief description of the activities which users would perform in order to reach their goals. Task models can represent both real time and virtual activities. They help us understand how our product will fit into the users’ lives for real. User journeys are a method of showing the ideal way for your product to perform these activities. The aim to create task models is to make sure your product matches to those of the expectations by the user of how the product actually works. Conducting such user research and developing task models turn out to be extremely useful in making design decisions later on. 

Creating Personas

A persona is a representation of the goals and behaviours of an actual group of users. They are derived from research with real users, so they have a strong grounding. A set of persona profiles represents a detailed understanding of real people. It is a short description of a fictional character that illustrates a known group of a product’s users. The character is named, pictured, and given biographical details. Their behaviour patterns, needs, and goals when interacting with the product are outlined. Although some of this detail is made up, the basic data is based on real user research its generation process goes something like this:

1. Understand your product’s users with research and statistics

2. Examine your data for themes and patterns

3. Organise those patterns into individual characters that reflect your findings

4. Bring the characters to life with biographical information and imagery

Generally, a persona is a one to two-page description of a fictionalized character. It captures such things as user behaviour patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environments. It makes sense to provide personas in a visually rich manner.

UX Navigation Map

This is one of the most integral part of the UX process and are typically designed and delivered by the UX designers. It depicts the entire UX navigation for the product. It is a complicated process and must be executed very carefully. Each screen, function and feature gets laid out in this map. It helps us to visualise the actual user experience of our product. UX maps are used by UX designers within the UX project to map out the questions, information needs, issues, and discomfort that users face when executing a task within the product. These maps also show where a link is missing to meet the users’ needs, hence providing a useful roadmap for planning further improvement.

Designing Information Architecture

The information architecture of a product or service is the design behind the design. It is the art that defines the experience, the thinking, and strategy that supports the final graphic design. It allows people to find what they want without really giving it much thought, making it easier for the user to navigate around the product. The most important component of IA design is an understanding of who will use the product and what they will use it for. It determines the order in which information is presented to the users. A UX designer requires the information to architect! When designing information architectures and navigations, designers have questions such like : 

• What content do we have? How much is there? What different types of content are there?
• What content do we need?
• What is the most intuitive way of organising this content?
• How will people want to move through this content to complete their tasks?
• How many levels of navigation would there be?
• Where will it appear on the different pages?
• Where will it appear within the interface?
• What will the specific navigation labels be?

Sketching Ideas

It is time to put all our mapping, navigation, content and information architecture in a visual presentation. Sketches are a great way to kick off your visual design and easy to share and represent your ideas. They’re the first step towards your visual design. They need not be visually appealing, they help in collaborating ideas and building the visual design.

Designing wireframes

We need to make sure we have our wireframes sketched before we proceed onto designing the same. They represent the framework of a website or an application. They’re a step ahead of the information architecture and a step behind the final product. Wireframes allow us to explore the entire framework in depth of each and every area of our website or application. The main aim of the wireframes is that they’re to be shared, commented and discussed upon. It allows us to make mistakes, rectify them and accordingly, improve the product. The entire team collaborates to explore the wireframes and gives their inputs. The UX designer is the one who designs and shares the wireframes within the team. There are multiple tools and technologies available to design these wireframes which bring color and life to them and we share it with our team members or client for exploration, testing and inputs. This is the part where our product is visually designed to a certain stage. 

Creating a Working Prototype

Once we have our wireframes rectified and agreed upon, we can use those wireframes to create a working prototype of our product. There are various tools available and trending to create prototypes these days. I prefer using Adobe Experience Design(XD). Prototypes too can be shared just like wireframes and the team collaborates to test it and give their inputs to make further amendments. A working prototype is also shared with the client to get his feedback and accordingly amendments are implemented. The product is given into development and an actual working prototype of the real product comes to life with the completion of the visual design.

Team Testing and Feedback

The developed working prototype is shared within the team and is out for further exploration and feedbacks. Comments and feedbacks are duly noted for improvements.

User Testing

After the internal team testing and feedback session, the prototype is shared to another level. It’s out for user testing. We share the prototype with a certain set of users and get their feedback on certain points and organise the feedbacks, comments, bugs, issues and any other discomforts faced by the user while executing tasks on the product. User testing is one of the most important part of the product development. 

Internal Amendments

We must gather and organise all the feedback and inputs, organise them in a way and assign the tasks to the dedicated people who are to perform it. We make the amendments and come up a Product Prototype, ready to be shared with the client for final testing. 

3. Post - Production

Client Testing

The Product Prototype is given to the client for the final testing and exploration round, wherein he can still give his inputs and suggest changes according to his business needs and design perspective. It’s important that the client is satisfied with the functionality and product design, look and feel. 

Second Client Meeting

Once the client has tested and explored the working prototype, its time we conduct the second meeting with the client and confront them. Take their feedback and inputs and discuss upon the negatives and positives of the product fairly in detail. Depending upon how the client meeting ends, we move forward to the next step.

Further Amendments - Design & Development

We take the feedback from the client and make the necessary amendments described and mentioned by the client. 

Final Testing

The end product is again shared for further testing within the team, set of users and client testing and feedbacks are welcomed if any. 

Final Product

Its time we deliver the final end product to the client and deliver him the necessary assets. 

THE END