Mastering UX Day 2: Design Process

Design Process

An effective User Experience strategy creates repeatable predictable results. Yet, the User Experience is dependent on many factors outside of the UX professionals control such as: programming tools, engineering methods, business processes etc. Therefore any effective design process must be independent yet complementary to these factors.

This day will concentrate on creating an effective design process that will compliment the Design Strategy. The day is split up into two parts.

• The first part covers forming a Concept, the essential step in good design process
• the second part covers the detailed design and delivery of the product or service.

Forming a concept I UX Research

This section discusses strategies and techniques for laying down the basic framework for your design direction including:

• User/Customer Research: understand your user audience
• what drives them
• why would they come to you
• the user/customer dichotomy
• Stakeholder research: what is important to the organization and flesh out your internal assumptions and risks.
• Business Case review: product/service release principles, themes and goals
• Competitive analysis: find out what you need to produce to be successful

Forming a concept II 5:3:1 design process

With the 5:3:1 process you assure you are addressing as many needs as time and budget allow by quickly exploring not just a single concept but multiple concepts and synthesizing them down to a single concept.

• 5 sketches: you start with 5 sketches. It is important that these sketches all be fundamentally different in some way not just 5 flavors of the same concept.
• 3 directions: From the five directions you synthesize 3 directions. You don’t pick three of the five, but analyze the five concepts and cherry picking what may or may not work from all and synthesize 3 new directions.
• 1 concept: in the final phase you analyze and decide which of the three directions will give you the greatest chance for success. But where possible also integrate picking aspects from the other directions that will help enhance the final direction into a killer concept.

Part 2a: Executing on the concept I: Iterative Design and Evaluate Alternatives (IDEA process)

Often the phase that follows a conceptual design is an incremental detailed design process. Where the design activity simply means outworking the concept. The process we recommend is different. We believe the concept is a seed which just starts to grow during the design work. The topics we cover here will be our approach to iterative design:

1. Creating first detailed designs rapidly
2. Evaluating iterations of design are evaluated with
• a cross section of stakeholders
• utilizing a variety of techniques appropriate to your needs
3. Proposing alternatives as needed
• prioritizing those over multiple releases
4. Refining the original concept
5. Revise the detailed designs
6. Go on to the next design based on new concept.
• Then repeat process at step 2

Part 2b: Executing on the concept II: Design delivery

Often a UX team will then just throw the design over the wall and go onto the next project. In our experience this is a recipe for disaster. During development is where the real work begins. Among the topics covered:

• Resolving technical challenges that did not come up during design
• Efficiently deploying UX during development
• Creating concept-conform work arounds instead of creating patchwork and putting lipstick on a pig.