For your product to really go the distance in its market, it's really important that users find it valuable. Having a valuable product means having a good UX design process that includes research, design, iterative testing and implementation to make it happen. But how does UX design work as a process? In this article, we'll take a look at the four stages of UX design.
UX design principles
First of all, let's briefly look at what UX design is all about. UX design is about understanding and shaping the what, where, when, why, and how of a user's experience. It’s a story that starts long before a product even reaches the market. That’s why it’s crucial to keep your target audience in mind throughout the process.
To achieve this, UX designers delve into both business and user goals to truly understand what users need or expect when using a product. A UX designer's main goal is to take all the data gathered from various UX research methods and tools and turn it into design decisions that you can see on an app, website, or platform. By getting to know the product’s users deeply, the designer can create something that reflects what they found out from their research. Let's now get into the four main stages of UX design.
1. The research stage
Before diving into designing or prototyping, a UX designer needs to understand what real users of a product or service need to do and why, alongside the general business goals associated with that product. While brainstorming and creating personas is a great step, these ideas are based in assumption, and should be backed by UX research and real data. UX research involves studying a target group to uncover their needs, wants, and issues, ensuring the product is relevant to them. This research forms the foundation for informed decisions and helps create a design strategy that is more likely to succeed, because it’s based on a deep understanding of users and actual evidence.
UX research keeps product development on track by uncovering problems and opportunities, making it a critical part of the design process. It enables a design team to create something usable, functional, and in line with user expectations.
UX research efforts can be qualitative, such as user interviews or focus groups, and also quantitative, like surveys. Qualitative research uncovers users' needs and pain points, while quantitative research helps rank the importance of features while evaluating market perceptions. Both types of research are part of a cohesive UX research phase that considers the product's current development stage. Some companies are tempted to skip parts of the UX research phase – like only doing quantitative research rather than qualitative. The risk here is that you end up lacking real evidence of users' needs, views and pain points.
As you dive deeper into research, it'll become clear that every user has varying needs and pain points. According to Adobe, user personas are archetypical users representing a larger group’s characteristics, behaviours, and goals. This can then help you to understand your primary user base.
The final outcome of UX research should be a list of product requirements, helping the business and development teams understand the product concept before moving to the design phase. It’s also crucial to remember why UX research is vital: it provides valuable data for decision-making and helps create products that align with user needs and problems.
2. The design phase
Next is the design phase, which includes creating user flows, wireframing, prototyping and creating the visual design of a product. This phase answers the when, where and how of your product’s user experience.
The design phase is typically carried out by a UX designer rather than a graphic designer. The role of a UX designer can vary by project and company, but their main responsibility is to advocate for and implement the UX design process. They work through the stages of research, design, and testing. Validation, iteration and user feedback are always crucial at every step. UX designers collaborate with researchers, other designers, developers and stakeholders in a company to ensure the product is user-focused, functional and visually appealing.
User flows
User flows are diagrams that map out the user's journey through a product, highlighting decision points and potential issues. They help designers anticipate user behaviour and create seamless experiences. User flows also aid in developing the information architecture and identifying integration points for the development team.
Wireframing
Once user flows are established, the next step is to create low-fidelity wireframes. These simple layouts define where and how users will interact with the product. Wireframes serve as a blueprint, allowing designers to experiment with and make changes to a product before committing to detailed designs. Wireframes ensure the content architecture is well-planned and scalable.
Prototypes
Developing prototypes allows users to interact with a working model of the product. This step is crucial for gathering feedback and making improvements before full-scale development. Prototypes help validate design concepts, and save time and money by addressing operational issues early.
Visual design
The final step is to create high-fidelity mock-ups. This involves selecting colour schemes, fonts, button styles and other user interface (UI) components to make the interface attractive and intuitive. Visual design ensures the product is cohesive, functional and appealing.
3. Iterative testing
We're going to log this as step three, but it actually takes place at the same time as step two (or alongside it). During the wireframing, prototyping and visual design steps, you'll need to conduct user testing and validate your user flows and UI decisions. While testing is traditionally considered the third phase of the UX design process, we recommend an iterative approach. This means continually moving between design and testing phases to adapt the product based on user feedback.
Expect to move back and forth between design and testing until the product is ready for implementation. The iterative nature of design testing allows for flexibility and simultaneous progression of multiple stages. Different groups within a design team might conduct various research stages concurrently, or combine information gathering and prototyping to visualise potential solutions.
Iterative testing is important because it can reveal new insights about users, leading to further ideation or prototype development. These stages don't follow a strict sequential order – they often happen in parallel, are repeated iteratively, or reorganised. Each stage is part of a system contributing to the project rather than a series of steps to follow meticulously. Great UX designers frequently iterate, refining each deliverable based on user feedback before moving into more detail. The goal is to create a thoroughly vetted user experience that requires minimal adjustments or rework during the implementation stage, which we will discuss as the final step.
4. Implementation
This is the final stage of the UX process, and it's where all the previous hard work is transformed into a fully functioning product. However, close collaboration with a development team is essential. This stage is just as important as the previous ones, because it brings your design to life.
Throughout the design stage, the development team should be involved in various meetings to understand the UX process, see the results of user tests, and follow design concepts. This continuous flow of collaboration ensures that developers are well-versed in the user experience, features, components, elements and interactions before they start building the product. Such collaboration is crucial to the success of your product, as it reduces the back-and-forth between UX and development and minimises potential misunderstandings.
During implementation, it’s important for designers to review the work in progress regularly to address any misunderstandings or confusion between UX and developers. Designers should also be available to come up with alternative solutions if the development team encounters any problems.
By maintaining close collaboration with your development team and continuing to test and refine the product, you can ensure a smooth implementation phase and a successful product launch.
