My design process

Over the years of designing digital products, I’ve established a pretty decent design process. Though each project is unique and has its own requirements and deadlines, I can be sure that by following these steps I’m on a way to successful completion. So how does this process look?

1. Understanding the problem

First of all, I need to understand the problem very well. This includes reading the task thoroughly, talking to a client and sometimes potential customers. We need to define clear goals to be able to prepare a good solution.

2. Competitive research

After the goals are set, I make research on similar existing solutions and competitors (if any). This helps to understand the product’s benefits and unique proposition and better highlight it.

3. Personas

Creating personas helps to always keep the end-user in mind. We are not designing for ourselves, but for real users who are out there waiting for their problems to be solved.

4. User journey and/or user flow

It’s very helpful further in the process to build a user journey map. It identifies key interactions and touchpoints with your website or mobile app and describes in detail the persona’s goals, motivations, and feelings at each step. User flow is not the same as the user journey, but sometimes they become interchangeable in UX design. User flow shows the user’s movement through the product, from entry point right through to the final interaction, and can potentially highlight the flaws in that path.

5. Wireframing

At this stage, I create rough sketches of the future user interface and transform them into wireframes. This skeleton helps to see the weak points and allows to tweak the UI on the fly.

6. Prototyping

Wireframes can be turned into clickable prototypes for user testing. This also helps to see where we made mistakes and correct them before we start going into details.

7. Visual design

When the general structure of the UI is designed and tested here comes the time to create a visual design. Wireframes start getting colors, icons, typography.

8. Fine-tuning and adding little details

After the visual design part is done, we can have user testing sessions again. This will allow to fine-tune the design. Then some tiny delightful pieces can be added to create the ‘Wow!’ effect. By this, I mean various animations and transitions between screens.

9. Iterating

Almost all of the above is an iterative process and the steps can be revisited a few times. Usually, everything is faster and some steps can be omitted in case we’re building an MVP. However, it doesn’t mean that we cannot return to them later after the release.