The 6 Stages of UX Design Process
ollowing the UX design process doesn’t just give users an intuitive and enjoyable experience, it provides an opportunity for designers to iterate and improve their designs.
The first step to designing an interface users will love is knowing exactly what that process entails.
Let’s take a look at the meaning of UX, how to break down the design process, and how you can apply this method to your next project.
What is UX design?
To understand UX design process, we have to understand the acronym.
“UX”, or “user experience”, is how a user feels when they use a specific product or service. It encompasses a variety of feelings including emotion, senses, and physical interaction.
The term was coined by Donald Norman, Apple’s former vice president of the company’s Advanced Technology Group, who 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.”
UX design is the system designers create for that experience with the goal of having the user’s experience be satisfying and easy. The term UX is involved in a lot of different products and services, but typically refers to the digital design experience.
Why is UX design important?
Good UX design creates a positive experience for your user by anticipating, and fulfilling their needs.
Successful products or services, such as a website or app needs good UX design.
UX design will look different from product to product and brand to brand. That means each UX design solution is going to be much different than others, so don’t worry about what the other team is doing.
The 6 stages of the UX design process
Your business’s UX design process is going to differ from other businesses. That means the stages below may be slightly different, and that’s okay! What’s important is that you find out exactly what works for your company.
Researching, iterating, and testing is all part of a good design process.
Stage 1: Understand
Before you get started with any project, you need to get the basics down first. That means understanding two crucial elements:
- 1st Your Users
- 2nd Your Brand
Since designing for the user experience is all about addressing your user’s issues and goals, you need to answer the question: What are their issues?
What issue are you trying to solve for your user? What problem are you trying to solve? And why are you the one with the answers?
When you understand what the problems facing your users are and you’re able to come up with the questions you need to answer, you’re able to create a strategy for design success.
How does this project align with your brand?
Next, you need to know how this project aligns with your brand’s mission and goals.
What are your company’s values and mission? How does this project contribute to that goal? Is this the right time for your company to be pursuing this project?
Keeping in line with your brand’s core mission is crucial to the success of your project and business.
The dedication to your core mission is the power of keeping in line with your company’s brand in mission.
Stage 2: Research
Once you know the project is in line with your core mission, and you know what questions you’re trying to solve, you need to conduct research.
User research is going to be the life blood of your project. The things you discover and unearth during this stage lays the foundation for how your entire project will turn out.
As a designer, you must challenge your assumptions. Good user research challenges all your assumptions.
Below are good methods of user research:
1- Interviews
Sitting down with someone from your target audience and ask them pointed questions about their issues is key. What are they struggling with? What are they looking for in your product? Face to face interviews are preferred since you can gauge their verbal and nonverbal reactions. Video or phone call can work as well.
Some good tools to use:
2 – User/Focus Groups
Organize a group of 3 – 5 target users and have them discuss their attitudes, emotions, and frustrations with an issue or product. It’s a discussion, not just an interview. Encourage a dialogue between the participants and yourself.
Some good tools to use:
- FocusGroupIt for easy group moderation
- Video camera for recording the the group
- Voice recorder for recording the group
3 – Surveys
Questionnaires you send out to your target users are good for finding out your users’ attitudes towards a specific topic with the added benefit of receiving the data as soon as the users are done with the survey. However, you have to be careful not to use leading questions that could disproportionately impact the results.
Some good online survey tools to consider:
4 – Usability Testing
This is the practice of observing your target audience using a program or product. For example, if you were a designer for the Uber app, you might ask your user to pull up the app and order a car. As they do so, you observe how the act and react to the app. When they’re done, you can ask them questions about their experience. This is a great opportunity to see how happy your user is with the app and if it adequately addresses their needs.
Some good tools to consider:
- User Testing to run a user test on your website
- Optimizely for good A/B testing
- maze for finding out what users are clicking on
Stage 3: Analyze
In this stage, you’ll be using all of the information you gathered in the previous two stages to analyze and distill the most important elements.
Here are two ways you can analyze your research:
User personas
User personas are profiles of your ideal customer
Designers use them to help understand a number of things about their customers including their:
- Goals
- Background
- Age
- Gender
- Behaviors
- Spending habits
- Pain points
- Needs
If you ever encounter a tough problem, you can always refer back to your persona and ask, “What design best services this person’s needs?”
You can create multiple personas to represent the varied users you have.
User journey maps
A user journey map is a representation of the user’s interactions with your product.
See example below:
According to Jim Kalbach, author of Mapping Experiences, the user journey map is crucial for:
- Building empathy
- Providing a common “big picture”
- Breaking down silos
- Bringing focus
- Revealing opportunities
Leveraging the things you learned in the research phase, create a user journey map to help you understand what your user will be going through when using your product or service. Only then can you build the best product for them.
Stage 4: Design
Now, you can start to build out your design.
That means building things like:
- Site map
- User flow
- Mockups
- Images
- Icons
- Colors
One of the most important things you can create at this stage is the wireframe.
A wireframe is like the prototype of your product, a bare essentials representation of your product.
It’s a sample of what your product will eventually look like. They’re typically notable for the block layouts and “X” placeholders to represent future images, and help accomplish three things:
- Presents information that will be displayed on the page
- Gives an outline of the structure and layout of the page
- Conveys overall direction and description of the user interface
Like a user journey map, this will give you a comprehensive look at your users’ experience with your product.
This is an iterative process. That means you won’t get it all done in the first go. You’ll have to design, redesign, get feedback and edit your wireframe content, design and layout.
Stage 5: Launch
After designing and redesigning, you’re going to reach a point where all your assets are ready to ship.
That means it’s time to implement; pass everything to the development team who will create a working version of the user interface.
Once it’s delivered, there are several ways you can go about making sure that the product is perfect and what your clients wants:
- User testing. Like the usability test, this involves you observing your target audience using the actual program.
- Beta launch. This is a limited release of your product to a small amount of people with the goal of finding issues and cleaning them up before you launch it to the world.
- Internal testing. When your own team uses the product and tests out each facet of it.
Feedback with the development team is crucial at this stage. You want to make sure that you clearly communicate any issues that arise and make sure that they are addressed before your product launches.
Stage 6: Analyze (again)
Once your product launches, it’s time for another round of analysis.
Instead of looking at the results of your research, you’ll be taking a look at the overall final product.
Some questions you might ask yourself:
- Where did our process go right? And why?
- Where did we struggle? And why?
- How are our users responding to the product?
- Did it solve their issues and pain points?
- Where can we improve the product?
- What lessons can we take away from this process for future products?
By thoroughly analyzing the product and the UX process, you’ll be able to get more out of the experience than just a product. You also gain invaluable knowledge you can leverage for the future.
What next?
Your UX process is going to be entirely unique to your business and product. This means the UX stages may look a lot different for you compared to another company and product. The important thing is that you find a process that works for you, your team, and your users.