Process
Initial Concept (Discovery, Research & Validation)
When a project is in its initial concept phase, research and validation are essential. Figuring out whether this project is useful and if your idea solves the users problems can save time and resources spent on building out the wrong idea. During this phase of the project there are a few things that should be established:
User Research
User Personas
This is your customer. Their goals, motivations, pain points, influences, environment, and where they are in their current journey are all key metrics to keep in mind when designing.
User Journey
What is your customer doing today? This is the steps they go through in their lives. This will help identify pain points and areas to improve.
Competitive Research
Competitive Analysis
What are your customers doing now to solve their problem and why? This will help understand your customers mental model when using your solution.
What Exists Today
Analysis
Look over what you already have built and understand how your users are interacting with it or why they aren’t.
These points of knowledge will help lead your project and should be evaluated throughout the lifespan of your project until your solution changes your user’s journey.
After having an understanding of your users, you want to validate your idea before rushing into development. This can be done through a Design Sprint, a 4 or 5 day workshop that ends with a tested idea. This test can help inform direction and understanding of how your users expect the solution to work. If what you designed doesn’t fit, another Design Sprint can be run. Testing ideas is much cheaper than having to pivot on a fully developed solution.
Building (Planning, Enablers & UI Design)
After validating the idea, it's time to start the building process. I’m most familiar with SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) so that will be the development methodology I use to describe the building process. For the first iteration most of the work should be architecture for development and exploratory enablers for design.
The UX enablers deliverable is a tested wireframe or concept that product owners/business analysts can write proper acceptance criteria, development can properly scope, and any API dependencies can be identified. For each enabler we broke down the problem the user was going through and what benefit would be achieved by solving it. We then stated our predispositions, assumptions around the solution and users. We used these assumptions to do research, gather inspiration, and collect insights. We reconvened with the cross-functional team to draw out the proposed solution before designing out wireframes and prototypes to be tested.
UI Design is the high-fidelity, fully fleshed out design. This includes different states, design system alignment, and design QA (if necessary). These are all the things to help development build the product as expected.
These enablers are done a PI ahead of development while the UI design is done one iteration ahead of development.