UX Design Process Explained  

User Experience (UX) is defined as the value your user gets when he/she uses your product. User experience design (UXD or UED) refers to the process of improving customer satisfaction with any product by offering an interaction that gives the user more accessibility, usability, and enjoyment. Building a user experience that gives high satisfaction to the customers is not just the responsibility of an employee or a team in an organization, but rather the main vision of a company. If your UX design process is not firm, it is unlikely to develop a product with a good UX. Contrary to this, a well-structured and well-defined UX process enables companies to deliver amazing experiences to users.   

UX Design process   

Each project needs a unique and different approach which means that the approach or design you use for a corporate website is not the same as the design you use for a food delivery app or a shopping site. The design process you choose will always be based on the kind of product you are designing. The UX Design process involves five important phases:  

• Product definition  
• Research  
• Analysis  
• Design  
• Validation  

Let us go through each phase one by one.  

Product definition  

The most significant step in the UX design process is the one before the company develops any product. It is important to learn and analyze the context in which a product exists before you create it. This phase lays the basis or stepping stone toward the final product. This is also the phase in which the UX designers start thinking about the basic concept or idea of the products at the highest level along with the shareholders. The product definition phase usually involves:  

• Shareholder interviews: interviewing main partners to collect insights into business objectives.  
• Value proposition mapping: identifying the main features and value propositions of the product like what kind of product it should be. Who will be the target users? Why would they use the product? etc. Value proposition enables the product team and shareholders to build consensus on what the product will look like and how it will adapt to customer and business requirements.  
• Concept sketching: generating a demo mockup of the upcoming product (a rough paper sketch of product architecture).  

This phase usually culminates in a project kick-off meeting, which brings together all the major players and fixes the appropriate expectations for the product team and shareholders. It includes a high level of product objective design, team structure (those who design and build the product), medium of communication (how they coordinate the work), and the expectations of the shareholders (like Key Performance Indicators and ways to evaluate the success of the product).   

Product research  

The second phase involves research. Once the product team has developed the concept for the product, they move on to product research. This phase usually involves consumer research as well as market research. Experienced product designers consider research as a sensible stage and a proper investment of time. Investing in healthy research at the early stage saves a lot of time and resources along the way by informing design decisions. The research phase varies according to the project as it depends on factors like time, resources, product complexity, and many more and the phase includes:  

• Individual in-depth interviews (IDI) – without proper customer analysis and understanding, no product can deliver a good experience. In-depth interviews give insights into qualitative data like the needs, desires, expectations, fears, and behavior of the target customers.  
• Competitive research – UX designers can easily learn and understand the industry standards and find out the available opportunities within a specific area of the product through thorough research.  

Analysis   

Analyzing information from the data gathered during the research phase is the goal of the analysis phase. The insights range from what customers need to why they would buy a product. At this point, the most relevant assumptions of the team are considered correct. The analysis phase mainly includes:  

• Creating user personas – personas refer to imaginary characters who represent various types of users of your product. When designing your product, you can refer to these personas as an actual characterization of your intended audience.  
• Creating user stories – explaining the perspective of a user about your product or service is called a user story and it is an excellent tool that gives a better understanding to the designers. It follows a particular structure that involves what the user has achieved from the product/service and the motivation behind using it.  
• Storyboarding – this is a tool that enables the designers to connect with fictional characters and user stories. As the name implies, this is primarily a story of a customer interacting with your product.  

Design   

During this phase, the product teams work on a variety of functions ranging from Information Architecture (IA) development to the real and final UI design. The active collaboration of every team member involved in the product design process is important for a design phase to be effective and it should be repetitive (as it should go back to validate ideas). This phase includes:  

• Sketching – is the best and easiest way to envision your ideas. You can either draw on paper or use any digital tool. It allows the team to envision a wide range of design solutions before picking one.  

• Creating wireframes – this tool acts as the backbone of a product as it is used by designers to understand the basic structure of an upcoming page, with all the major components and how they fit together.   
• Creating prototypes – refers to the real experience the product delivers during an interaction.  
• Creating a design specification – This includes all the visual design resources that developers need to convert the prototype into a real final product.  

Testing or validating  

Testing or validation of the product is an important phase in the design process as it allows the team to get better insights into the working of the product when it reaches the customer. The team validates the product with all the shareholders and customers during different series of testing sessions. The phase includes:  

• Testing sessions – the testing session includes conducting a wide variety of testing formats like focus groups, beta testing, and A/B testing, among the target audience.  
• Surveys – UX designers can gather both quantitative and qualitative information from the users through surveys, where they can ask open-ended questions to end-users.  
• Analytics – it helps to detect the user’s interactions with your product.  

Wrap Up  

In the User Experience Design process, you cannot find a solution that fixes all the problems at once. There process you follow may be different but the objective behind every process is the same – to give the product to your users. Use the best for your project, skip the rest, and expand your UX process with the product’s development.