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Navigating client goals, budgets, deadlines, tech stacks, and platforms can feel like finding your way through a maze.
How do we begin?
Gathering Requirements
It is important to take a proactive approach when collaborating with business stakeholders to get a clear understanding of current goals, KPIs, pain points, and information architecture.
Learning as much as possible about how the current system works (or doesn't), its strengths, weaknesses, and business goals is critical to moving forward.
Users
Developing personas, journey maps, and user stories allows you to understand:
User roles
Use cases
How they relate to users
Intended audience
Put the human user in the center of the design
User Empathy
Who are we solving for?
Conducting user interviews and research is an invaluable tool to understanding who we are solving for. This can range in complexity from detailed user interviews and persona creation, to quick and inexpensive unmoderated studies.
Ultimately, finding a way to solve an immediate user need while satisfying a business goal is the mark of a good solution.
Solutions
Once the necessary analysis and research is complete, there might be a number of potential solutions. Do these solutions:
Meet both the needs of the user and the business?
Simply & elegantly represent complex IA (Information Architecture)?
Have a high usability factor for end users?
Wireframes
We have a great idea!
The whole point of wireframes is to communicate this idea to the client or business stakeholder. Low fidelity wireframes are great for starting a dialog and ideating. As the ideas become more refined, these designs evolve into increasingly high fidelity functional prototypes, demonstrating behavior, as well as layout and visual design.
Figma has become the design tool of choice these days as it offers excellent sharing across multiple teams and stakeholders, and effectively eliminates version control issues of the past.
Iterate
The iterative process is important to dialing in the solution to meet everyone's needs. It is unlikely that you will get it exactly right the first time.
Measuring Success
With user testing and analytics, we can determine usability, discoverability, and the success of certain business KPI's. We can continually refine our products and tools based on changing user needs.
Deliverables
Functional prototypes, full color mock-ups containing branding, technical specs, style guides, and pattern libraries are just some of the deliverables that can be required for a project. There are many tools that aid in the creation of these artifacts, and this design tooling is an area that is evolving rapidly.
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