UX Design — The Process
User Experience Design is all about designing a seamless experience for your user. But, what does day to day activities of a UX designer look like and what are the processes they follow? These were some of the questions I was looking answers for, a month ago. And guess who came to the rescue? Internet.
There is no bound on the resources available today on internet and adding to that are blogs, people write, sharing their personal experience.
Below is the list of different tasks a UX researcher/designer performs —
What to build
Idea. Where does it come from? Whose responsibility is to propose them? Product Managers? Designers? Developers? Sales People? Or the Customers? Ideas may come from anyone. It’s important to learn to welcome them.
Define your problem statement
Clearly stating what problem you’re trying to solve is a very crucial part of the process.
User Research
Taking the inputs from the user. What do they think about the problem you’re trying to solve? Or is there something else which has been their pain point all this while? It is important to conduct user research to know what the users need.
Gather all the findings at one place
All the findings gathered while conducting user research should be brought together for further analysis.
Affinity Mapping
Grouping all the user research findings in different clusters to identify them as features or to sort them to make right design decisions.
User Personas
Creating different User Profiles which can show your potential users. They are intended to feel like real people.
User Flow
Creating User Flow diagrams illustrating how a particular user can take different paths on your application to complete a specific task.
Information Architecture
Refers to breaking down a product into most basic contents which includes navigation, content organization, interaction design.
Sitemap
Here you create and link different pages of your application. XML Sitemaps are used by web crawlers to land at your page.
Wireframe
Creating a basic layout/blueprint of the application without much focusing on the look and feel.
Prototype
A working model of the product. This model is again sent for testing to the users and their feedback is recorded. It is an iterative process until the design is finalized and sent for development.
