UX design process
In my design-process, I try to stay as agile and flexible as possible. I like to quickly iterate over research and design, testing prototypes and designs at an early stage. It looks something like this:
- There's some issue that needs to be resolved (found via research) or a new feature/ product that needs to be developed
- First: get a clear insight into what user problem we are trying to solve and/ or what business goal there is to achieve. With this comes a decision of what the minimum viable product (MVP) should be
- (If there's time) gather input and ideas from the people already working on the product (product owners, developers, tester, salespeople, customer service, etc.) via collaborative design in e.g. a design studio
- Get as much data (e.g. from Google Analytics, sessions recording software, feedback-buttons, etc.) as possible to get insight in the current situation
- If necessary: benchmark and get inspiration from competitors & peers
- Creating rough sketches - based on the design studio - with pen & paper or in Axure; use those sketches to get early feedback and further tweak the design idea
- Talk to developers to get more insight into the technical implications of the design idea and adapt if necessary
- Start working on something - a prototype - that may start to look like a user interface (UI), using a combination of Sketch, Axure, InVision and/ or Marvel
- Get more feedback, tweak prototype, get more feedback, tweak prototype, etc. (at debijenkorf.nl we try to do this every week in stores in guerrilla-style usability testing)
- As soon as possible: get it in Zeplin and 'into the browser' in a HTML-prototype, preferably created by the developers
- Continue validating and tweaking the HTML-prototype until we reach something that matches the MVP-requirements and we feel confident enough to put live
- AB-test, measure and repeat :-)
As you can see, design can not live without research. And vice versa.