UI/UX design process: how to do it right

Creating and following an efficient UI/UX design process is essential for any successful product design. This is a difficult multi-step journey where you always should remember what UX stays for – user experience. By putting your users and their needs and preferences to the first place on each stage of the UI/UX process, you create a digital product that will be on demand by that same user and satisfy them completely. So, let’s break down the UI/UX design process step by step and discover useful tricks to make the end-user happy.  

Learn about UX design process at Pixetic

Why it’s so important to modern business? 

The objective of any great UX design is to make a good impression on users and win their hearts. However, you got only one chance to do it, so you need to be sure that your user is satisfied. How to achieve that? Research. You need to gather all information on the potential users and make the right sense of it. So, the user and research are two milestones of the UX workflow. But there’s more to that— business.  

With the UX design process, you try to solve specific problems users encounter every day. Therefore, you ask yourself why you need to create something, meaning how you can help protentional users of a certain app for instance. But also, you should get another perspective and answer the “why” question in the business context. To do that you need to understand the type of software, device, and eventually product you want to create. Then, assess how it will be demanded by users and profitable for your business. Because to create a truly great product you should find a balance between user’s needs, business requirements, and budget resources.  

Getting started: product definition stage

Before beginning to make the first sketches and shaping out your future product you need to gather all the available information about it. This includes your client’s requirements and UX design process requirements. Let’s take a closer look at each of these points:  

• Get to know your client. When you meet your client to discuss their future project, it’s a moment when you begin to understand how it should look and perform. At this stage, you dig for valuable information: what are their desires and limitations, who is the audience they’re aiming at, and what goals clients want to achieve with this product, technological constraints, etc. If a client wants to improve the existing product, a designer usually asks them about its main pain-points.  
• Business, user, and technical requirements. In a nutshell, the business requirements that designers should discover on this stage cover the main objectives that the company or start-up your client represents want to achieve. These requirements are usually gathered through stakeholders’ interviews. User requirements are basically what users want. As we stated before is essential for UI/UX design process. This data is further discovered during the user research stage. And finally, technical requirements include features that the product should able to do (functional specifications) and how well the product performs (non-functional requirements), meaning its usability, maintenance, etc.  
• Team meetings and preparation. The final team meeting at the beginning of the UX process is one of the most important UX design process steps. The objective of this meeting is to make sure that the client and the design team are on the same page. Also, during this meeting team creates a detailed project plan and outlines possible challenges. Moreover, during the UX process, a team can have “design critiques” meetings to collect feedback on the design and find a solution to fix the problems.  

Doing homework: user research stage

You’ve probably already familiar with the fact that user research is all about understanding user needs, preferences, motivations, etc. This information is essential as the better you understand the potential users, the better experiences your app will deliver. There are some conventional means of data gathering like user interviews and meetings, creating user personas, etc. Here are other means for effective user research:  

• Storyboard. This method is actually borrowed from the filmmaking process. It helps designers to predict how potential users will interact with their product. Basically, it’s a comic strip that illustrates how users act and the circumstances under which they behave this way. This is a great way to analyze how the environment influences users and their interaction with the product. It also helps to test both existing and hypothetical scenarios of interaction.  
• Customer journey map. Another great way to analyze how users will interact with your product is a customer journey map. It’s a diagram that allows exploring the steps user take when interacting with your product to achieve a specific goal. This helps to learn about motivations that drive users, and the problems they may encounter.  
• Use cases. The use cases describe how the user will interact with your product to accomplish a certain task and how this product responds to the user’s actions. Each use case is a sequence of user’s steps from them having a specific goal to the point when they achieve that goal. This approach is user-centered and aimed at assessing a user’s interaction with the system rather than the system itself.  

Getting to the point: the prototyping stage

The prototyping stage allows designers to create a sample version of the product to see how it works and get feedback. This enables them to introduce iterations to the design and tests new ideas without investing too much. In other words, at this stage, designers are trying to create the best version of the product. Here are the methods of achieving that.   

• Low-fidelity prototype. The low-fidelity prototypes don’t include visual design but rather focus on the functionality of the product. Paper prototypes and wireframes are low-fidelity prototyping techniques. Wireframes are the draft visual representation of the product’s user interface which outlines the key elements in a hierarchical order. It is very useful in outlining the layout, structure, functionality, and content of the design. Also, this is a great way to discuss ideas and introduce changes at the early stage of the UX design process.  
• High-fidelity prototype. The high-fidelity prototypes can show the visual features of the design and are closer to the final version of the product design. This version of design includes not only user interface features in terms of visuals but also, covers user experience, meaning their interaction with design, user flow, and behavior. At this stage, designers can examine in detail the usability issues and see how users behave in response to their design solutions.  

Polishing UX design: user testing and iteration

After successfully creating a prototype, the designers proceed to test it with the users. This UX design process step allows you to get valuable insights on the future product design, to check whether it meets user expectations, and to make sure that the initial business decision matches the reality, meaning whether a product is going to be profitable. Here are the essentially any design agency process steps at this stage. 

• A/B testing. This method is incredibly useful to see which version of your design solution works better. Basically, you split users into two groups and give each one of the design versions. This allows designers to see how each of the versions performs. This way you can test alternative design implementations (like landing page, design features, etc.) and settle on the right one.  
• Usability testing report. The usability testing report is crucial for evaluating your product’s performance. It helps to check how it fulfills the user’s expectations and the problem they may have encountered. Data for the report can be gathered through users’ interviews, focus groups, invite users to try it in the usability labs, etc. It creates the visual (charts, diagrams) and textual representation of findings and user comments to make the iteration introduction process easier.  
• Analytics report. An analytics report is a post-launch method to gather feedback on the product design performance and insights on how the issues can be fixed. For example, by analyzing how the real users interact with their product, designers can see whether they use certain features, and if not, find the reason why. Therefore, the report usually includes not only data on users’ experience with the product but also, further recommendations.  

Further tips

Accomplishing all UX process steps is enough to create a good product design but maybe not enough to make it great. Here are some UI/UX design insights to get the whole process to another level.  

Learn how users interact with their personal things   

Understanding user behavior and how they will conduct in a certain environment can be difficult. Moreover, sometimes users don’t fully understand what they exactly want or why they behave that way. Therefore, it can be very helpful to observe and analyze how they normally act in their everyday life. According to one research, it can be also very helpful to observe how people interact with their personal things, notably at home. The paper itself is focused more on the IoT and how to detect possibilities and challenges for this technology. But the same technique can also be applied to the UX design process.  

The main point of this method is not to focus on the objects but rather on how people interact with them and the pattern behind those interactions. Therefore, it’s interesting to observe how people behave with their personal belongings like books and phones. This shows that you should look beyond the technical parts of your design to understand better user’s behavior and how you can help them.

Cultural probes to inspire your UX design

This is another great way to get insights from your users’ behavior and understand their needs better. In a nutshell, cultural probes are user research method that helps designers to understand their everyday needs and challenges. It’s usually conducted at the beginning of the UX process. The participants of this research are asked to document. Also, give comments on the specific aspect of their everyday life. Basically, it’s a diary that users complete to understand their real behavior and get impartial insights.  

This method is very helpful for designers to find inspiration, especially when your user research results in collecting too much data. The cultural probe itself can be made in any form, not only a diary. You can choose any method suitable for your design idea of collecting this type of data. Meaning you can ask users to complete routine tasks, take pictures every day, etc.    

Social responsibility in influence on user’s behavior  

Nowadays society is becoming more and more concerned about global problems. According to research, most social issues require the change of personal conduct and products can influence users’ social behavior to achieve that. For example, if it’s a navigation app, you can add a message to ask users to drive responsibly or ask them to slow down when they’re driving too fast.  

However, by aiming at influencing the user’s social behavior, designers should carefully think through how to implement this idea. The thing is, to persuade users to behave in a certain, more socially responsible way but not annoy them. Therefore, you need to find the right design solution and find the right approach to the busy and stressed-out modern users.  

Final thoughts 

To sum up, the UI/UX design process consists of multiple steps. Each of them is equally important to the product design and puts the users at the center of everything. Also, when building a UX design, designers shouldn’t forget about clients and the business goals they pursue. So, everything has to be in balance. Moreover, you shouldn’t forget about different ways to understand users and the social influence your app can have on them.