Do you have a UX strategy in place? To make sure you put users and their journey first, it is essential that you prioritize the UX design process in your product development cycle.
Effective user experience design creates a streamlined and interactive journey. It covers everything from divergent and convergent thinking to user research and prototyping. There are several approaches to consider – from Double Diamond to Design Sprint, each with its own focus and methods.
At Netguru, we’ve developed our own design process, using well-known models as a base. In this article, apart from giving you some definitions, history, and pro tips, we’ll outline our unparalleled design process for UX.
This UX Design Process Guide has been prepared by Mateusz Kłosiński, Senior UX Designer at Netguru.
A design process comprises the steps you must take to convert an idea to reality. How about adding user experience into the mix? Focusing on the user has roots in the ancient science of ergonomics, but the term wasn’t formally coined until 1993 when Don Norman, a cognitive psychologist and designer, joined Apple as a User Experience Architect. Interestingly, it was the first time “User Experience” was seen in a job title.
Speaking in an interview, Don Norman said: “I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual.”
The UX design process spans the steps you need to create a product or solve a problem while keeping the user’s experience and goals in mind. The target? A UX that’s satisfying, meaningful, and pleasant.
Ultimately, without a clear and strong UX design process, your product has less chance of offering people a fulfilling experience. A well-defined and executed process shapes and guides designers’ work and helps them build intuitive and streamlined experiences for users.
A robust UX design process:
The best design isn’t always the first one you think of. Moreover, you can’t know what the ideal design is until you generate more than one solution and compare them. With that in mind, design is an iterative process and often involves assessing several ideas. It is good to set up creative sessions where designers and stakeholders are challenging the ideas to find the best solution. Through that, you highlight:
As a result, you earn their trust and strengthen the client-partner relationship.
A successful UX design process is customized to the client and their individual requirements. There’s no room for pre-built templates – these only serve to lower the client’s opinion of the design team. Bespoke and long-term plans build client confidence and demonstrate the design team’s skill and breadth of knowledge. Your UX design process must stand out from the crowd, so evaluating and determining the best way forward is key. This, in turn, adds value to not just the project but also your connection with the client.
There are several process models that designers can choose from. We’ll describe a few of them later on, but at this juncture, it’s important to underline that even though you can follow different models, the flow beneath each of them is similar and usually adheres to divergent and convergent thinking.
Divergent and convergent thinking makes up the basis of the UX design process. Both of these ways to approach problems and solutions are essential, acting as counterbalances:
Divergent and convergent thinking aren’t mutually exclusive, meaning you gather a diverse and extensive set of information and then reduce and refine that.
UX product design process uses divergent and convergent thinking and most often consists of five steps. Before delving into specific models, let’s look into them one by one.
Before the product team actually builds anything, there has to be context surrounding why it's being created in the first place. The product definition phase lays those foundations, whereby UX designers brainstorm with stakeholders at a concept level, gathering insights about their business goals.
Alongside that, there’s usually value proposition mapping. Here, key aspects of the product are discussed, including what it is, who will use it, why they will use it, and what makes it attractive to customers. By doing that, the team and stakeholders reach a consensus on what the product will be, as well as how to match user and business needs. This phase will feature concept sketching during which designers will develop an initial mockup of the product.
This stage will also involve a kick-off meeting, where the key players come together to set project expectations for both sides: the product team and stakeholders. The meeting covers a high-level outline of areas such as:
Once the definition is complete, it’s time to move on to the research phase of the UX design process, including both market research and user research. While it is undoubtedly a valuable investment, it informs design decisions – and if done early (always advisable), it saves money down the line.
This phase varies from project to project, depending on various factors, such as complexity, availability of resources and timing, but generally, it includes individual in-depth user interviews (IDI) and competitive research. The former phase involves talking to potential users from your target audiences to collate qualitative data about user behavior, needs, wants, fears, and motivations. The latter phase is all about helping UX designers understand industry standards and identify the ways the product can stand out.
At this point, you draw insights from the data you collected during the previous stage, establishing the “why”. Why do potential users want what they want, think the way they do, and need the things they’ve outlined? This is when designers confirm whether the previously made assumptions are correct, and may include:
This is when users’ wants, needs, and expectations are set out. It’s time to move to the design phase and areas such as user flow and site maps. During this collaborative and iterative stage, activities such as creating information architecture (IA) and UI design are worked on and validated. There’s also:
Aka testing, this essential final step of the UX design process involves a series of user testing sessions with users who represent your target audience. The phase helps teams understand whether the design actually works for both potential customers and stakeholders. Types of user testing include usability testing, A/B tests, as well as focus groups.
Additional actions that take place during this stage involve testing in-house to discover usability flaws and feedback surveys for gathering quantitative and qualitative data from real-world users. You can start validating the product at an early stage by testing a clickable prototype, or later, using metrics once the product is live. Analytics on areas such as clicks, navigation time, and search queries will reveal how users interact with the product.
A tried and tested UX design process achieves results – but which one is best for your project? There are several well-known blueprints to choose from, encapsulating the above steps. Below, we’ll look into three of them.
A high-level strategy using divergent and convergent thinking – the world-renowned Double Diamond approach was developed by the British Design Council in 2004 and is described by them as “a clear, comprehensive, and visual description of the design process.”
The framework is generally used for a long-running process and whenever broad brainstorming is required. Usually managed by a single designer or team, this method helps you define milestones and highlights what you should focus on at each stage.
The ethos? Ideas should go through divergent thinking before being refined through convergent thinking. Think about divergent thinking as opening your arms wide to catch all the creative ideas and going narrow to draw out the main essence.
As part of that, Double Diamond is divided into four key phases:
Exploring ideas and executing the “best” ones should focus on putting people first, communicating visually and inclusively, collaborating, co-creating, and iterating.
Challenges associated with this model include little emphasis placed on time, which means that the project manager is responsible for creating a timeline. Also, some describe the framework as too linear, meaning it doesn’t necessarily align with today’s Agile approach.
Our pro tips for this approach include:
This model was popularized by IDEO and d.school and has been going strong since 2005. Think of it as a toolbox of methods you can use according to the needs of the project. It involves many creative processes that are focused on speedy problem-solving. It comes down to validating concepts with prototypes at the early stages of product development.
“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success,” says Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO.
The non-linear, iterative framework is divided into five phases:
Following that, it’s all about implementing and launching.
This approach works well when you’re trying to understand or solve open-ended problems in a specific area of expertise. However, it’s less useful when the outcome is mostly known in advance.
It’s important to mention that Double Diamond and Design Thinking are sometimes confused and merged because they both allow the design team to go from a problem to a solution via similar phases. The main difference is that Double Diamond is seen as a higher perspective of the design process itself, setting the steps the designer or design team should follow.
Here are some of our top tips for Design Thinking:
Created by Google, a Design Sprint is their version of the Design Thinking model. It takes up to five days and is the most structured of the models we talk about. It’s a short, simple, and focused way of bringing a team together, as well as understanding a problem and solving it.
The model takes influences from the Agile development approach and is tailored to digital products. The main steps are:
According to Google, you should use Design Sprints at the start of a new project to create a vision and define a product. They’re also useful when you need to work quickly, if you’re blocked on an issue, or if you need to take action after uncovering new insights.
Meanwhile, don't use them if you don’t have a robust understanding of your target users, if you already have a clear direction but just need time to design, or if you haven’t obtained buy-in from leadership.
The handy tips in this case would be to:
Here at Netguru, to achieve exceptional UX design, our UX professionals focus on a human-centered approach. Our UX services help us create intuitive experiencesthat are tailored to the customers, including:
Our dedicated UX product design team helps clients craft an idea for a new product or elevate the quality of an existing solution. Our process focuses on delivering a product that’s laser-targeted to the users’ needs through:
From there, the user interface (UI) design kicks in with:
We’ve spent years honing our processes and incorporating industry best practices. To that end, we’re ready with proven tools and battle-tested methodologies that consistently deliver first-rate products and services. Read on for just a few examples of our work.
This award-winning self-care mobile app helps users deal with daily stress via well-being content. We partnered with Shine on UX and UI design. Thanks to its excellent usability, the app has gained worldwide acknowledgment with 7,000 5-star reviews.
This time, we helped the leading language learning platform build a new business branch. As part of that, we created an additional module for the existing app to prepare it for a new B2B strategy, empowering administrators to manage users with greater flexibility. The new module had to fit with the brand’s existing image, so we worked on the dashboard flow, making the user journey smooth and intuitive for customers.
Speaking of the UX design process, we should mention that Product Design Sprint is our workshop approach that combines best practices from Design Thinking and Design Sprint, allowing us to explore new products and ideas together with different perspectives. It helps us identify the right way forward without risking large sums of money. We believe it’s best to start a project with a Product Design Sprint and continue its development using our UX design process services.
There are inherent risks to launching a new product or feature, let alone doing that successfully. Our Product Design Sprint is a five-day workshop that uses Design Thinking to help mitigate those risks, where each day corresponds to a problem-solving stage.
This planning methodology gets you answers to critical business questions fast and helps you solve complex business issues. The five phases enable you to better understand your business ideas and needs. Our workflow has proven effective in finding the right solutions for various clients, such as Volkswagen and The City of Warsaw.
We’ve found a powerful way to explore varying perspectives and identify the optimal direction to take, and it goes as follows:
After the Product Design Sprint, our team sends you a detailed digitized report from the workshops, including:
What are the benefits of Netguru’s Product Design Sprints? You end up with solutions and recommendations, which enables you to develop a unique value proposition.
Let’s take a look at design process tips that will help you navigate product development and achieve desired results.
Let’s face it, most of us have long-standing processes that we do because it’s the way things have always been done. It’s time to shake things up and make existing methods better and more efficient. Here’s how:
Research by PwC revealed that 82% of top-performing companies pay close attention to user experience. It can’t be denied that developing and following a clear UX design process is a key part of that. Whether you opt for a pre-existing model, such as Design Thinking or Double Diamond, or create your own model, five core focus areas are likely to be incorporated: definition, research, analysis, design, and validation.
Outstanding UX design is about building human-centered products that engage users. The well-established design process for UX helps you build forward-thinking yet easy-to-navigate user experiences that are tailored to your customers. With the UX design process, it is possible to simplify your work and provide a flexible way to create products.
It is important to build a strong partnership between you and the UX Design Agency and find a partner to support you in achieving business results.
Mateusz brings over 5 years of experience to the table in User Experience design His talents range from leading research initiatives, organizing workshops and creating stunning designs for web, mobile and desktop applications.