Here is a brief introduction of my general UX design process and some related examples from my works.
Discover
observation
Test & Iterate
Describe
synthesis
Design
ideation
Develop
prototype
Shadowing
Observe user’s behavior, find success points and pain points, understand user’s concerns, thoughts, feelings, and how they make decisions.
Design question / Hypothesis
Write down “How might we...” questions to clearly define the problem. The question should be concrete, allow multiple solutions, and focus on only one problem. Then, based on the question, we can find out what the hypothesis is to solve this problem, or prove this problem exists.
Verification
Design quick tests, such as user interviews, questionnaires, coming-soon landing pages and online ads, to verify and prove the hypothesis, prove that the problem we want to solve is a legitimate problem, and prove that the target user group is as large as our estimate.
User research
Design personas to clearly understand and define user’s goals, needs, pain points and behaviors. The personas should portray several typical users of our product, with their profile, goals, needs, pain points and behavior, to help us to design for them and consider their needs.
Brainstorming
Brainstorming the solutions, categorize them, and pick some to put into the next step afterwards.
Competitive analysis
Study the competitors of existing solutions and their pros/cons in comparison to our own solutions.
Storyboard for scenario
Create storyboards for scenarios of a solution. The storyboard should depict the target user, the problem (pain points), how the user gets to know the product (our solution), what motivates the user to use it, and how the product solves the user’s problem.
User flow
Based on storyboard, follow user’s natural thought process and behavior to design user’s task flow of the solution.
Wireframing
Based on the user flow, convert the solution into the product structure and visual views, to get feedback from stakeholders (users and team members, etc.).
Paper prototyping
Print the wireframes to make quick and inexpensive paper prototypes, and do user tests to find out UX problems in an early stage of the design process.
Digital prototyping
Build interactive digital prototypes, with tools like OmniGraffle / InVision / Marvel, and include some real contents (images, texts, ...) for further user tests to find out more UX problem.
As an example, here is an interactive digital prototype I made with Marvel: Boil Monitor v3.
User testing
Design user tests, set goal and tasks for user to complete, to observe how user understands/uses the interface and to confirm if the design solves the design question, and to improve the UX of the interface.
Analyze the result and iterate the design to converge to the final product.
