Product design (UX/UI design) is becoming one of the most important roles in the tech industry. Designers are under pressure to accelerate product development and reduce the time, effort, and cost spent. We’ve been there and understand what it’s like.
This eight-step process can help you speed up development and achieve all of the above. Use it to understand your product goals and customers, and also to collaborate with the entire team to discover problems, ideate, test, and validate potential solutions.
Your first step is to understand the product’s “big picture” and the vision behind it. You’ll need to answer the following questions:
In order to answer the questions above, you’ll need to meet with project stakeholders. In your interviews with them, ask for the following:
Roadmaps facilitate team collaboration and clarity around priorities. Create a roadmap to help your team better understand:
User research is one of the most important steps in the product-design process. All of your team’s hard work, time, and money will be worthless if you end up making a product that no one wants to use or that can’t compete in the market.
Here are some research methods to help you better understand your users and competitors:
Information architecture helps you organize and structure the content of your product in a way that your users can find what they are looking for easily without having to go in circles. Create this structure for your product through any of these methods:
Discovery is an important phase that allows designers to work with the entire team to define and research problems identified in steps 1-3, as well as gather enough information and initial direction on what to do next. Discovery will help you frame problems with all the evidence you need before moving to the ideation phase.
The ideation phase moves you from learning about your users and the problem to coming up with potential solutions. In this phase, gather together and come up with as many ideas as possible. The focus is on quantity, not quality.
Some ideas may surface as the potential solutions to your problem. Others will end up in the reject pile. If carried out properly, an ideation session can lead you to find that groundbreaking solution that you and your users are looking for.
User testing gives you the opportunity to evaluate and validate your ideas with the users. At this stage, you’ll be able to gain deep information about your users’ behavioral patterns, preferences, and suggestions. Testing early during the design process allows you to prevent future re-design costs and to launch a user-friendly product.
With the usability testing complete, you can start updating the design according to the feedback you received. You will now design what the screens will actually look like and create the final UI through high fidelity wireframing and prototyping.
Your last step is to share the design with developers and walk them through the entire user flow to give them the opportunity to review what needs to be implanted and raise any questions or concerns. Once the development starts, you might need to do any of the following tasks:
If you follow this process, you’ll be able to develop products with:
This high-level overview is a great starting point, but every organization and product has different needs. If you’d like to talk about how to improve your current product development process or how to establish a new one, contact us today.