The biggest challenge is the mindset shift, instead of thinking in screens, you need to focus on user needs and business goals.
Step 1: Dissect your design process
Start to create wireframes before UI design. Learn how to Plan flows before designing screens. UX isn’t a single step and it’s certainly more than opening up your laptop and knocking out wireframes. UX Design is a process, it’s a series of steps that you go through to create wildly successful products.
The research stage is where you set out to learn everything about:
a. the business you’re creating the product for
b. the people who will use the product, aka the users
In other words, you’re gathering Business Requirements and User Requirements. The techniques for gathering these requirements are the following.
On the Business side:
- Stakeholder Interviews — Interviews with your clients
- Competitive Benchmarking — Gleaning best practices from the competition
On the User side:
- User Interviews — Interviews with your product’s users/audience
- Surveys — Questionnaires that help gather qualitative information about users
- Personas — Fictional characters that represent subsets of your users
Step 2: Start before the design
Next, you need to learn what goes into a product before starting designing screens. These include User personas, Business objectives, Journey Maps, and Story Maps. Once done with all of these you can dive into the actual design.
One my favorite stages in the process and perhaps the most fulfilling. The design stage is where the product comes to life. It’s where you take all the insights and findings you gathered from Research and use them to create a tangible design. The output of the Design stage — sometimes referred to as deliverables — includes:
- Information Architecture — Organizing content, making it easy to find
- Wireframes — Skeleton or blueprint of the content/functionality of your product
- Prototypes — An interactive demo of your product that you can share with clients and users for testing
Step 3: Learn Research & Test
UX without research is guesswork. To make better decisions, you need to learn how to do research, testing, and measure the success of designs.
Start with Usability Testing & User Interviews.
Followed by Card sort, Field study, Diary studies, AB Testing, Analytics, Visual Analytics, and Surveys.
For me, the test stage is the most important stage in the UX Design Process because it allows you to Flag major issues before the product moves to UI Design and Development. This is crucial because as the product approaches these later stages, it becomes more difficult (and more expensive) to make changes. Whereas, in wireframes making changes and solving issues is quick and painless. For this very reason, it’s important to test early and test often.
What does the testing stage look like? I personally divide it into the following steps:
- Plan — Write a test plan
- Conduct — Test
- Report — Analyze and document your results
- Optimize — Iterate your designs based on the results
Step 4: Deliver
This is where you take all the work you’ve done so far (Research, Design, Testing) and share it with the other teams involved in the project. These teams include UI Designers, Developers, Copywriters, and even your client.
The techniques involved in the Deliver stage include:
- Documentation — Where you package up all your UX Design work so you can share it with the other teams
- Quality Assurance & Feedback — Where you make sure your UX work has been implemented correctly by other teams
