User Experience (UX) is defined as the value your user gets when he/she uses your product. User experience design (UXD or UED) refers to the process of improving customer satisfaction with any product by offering an interaction that gives the user more accessibility, usability, and enjoyment. Building a user experience that gives high satisfaction to the customers is not just the responsibility of an employee or a team in an organization, but rather the main vision of a company. If your UX design process is not firm, it is unlikely to develop a product with a good UX. Contrary to this, a well-structured and well-defined UX process enables companies to deliver amazing experiences to users.
Each project needs a unique and different approach which means that the approach or design you use for a corporate website is not the same as the design you use for a food delivery app or a shopping site. The design process you choose will always be based on the kind of product you are designing. The UX Design process involves five important phases:
Let us go through each phase one by one.
The most significant step in the UX design process is the one before the company develops any product. It is important to learn and analyze the context in which a product exists before you create it. This phase lays the basis or stepping stone toward the final product. This is also the phase in which the UX designers start thinking about the basic concept or idea of the products at the highest level along with the shareholders. The product definition phase usually involves:
This phase usually culminates in a project kick-off meeting, which brings together all the major players and fixes the appropriate expectations for the product team and shareholders. It includes a high level of product objective design, team structure (those who design and build the product), medium of communication (how they coordinate the work), and the expectations of the shareholders (like Key Performance Indicators and ways to evaluate the success of the product).
The second phase involves research. Once the product team has developed the concept for the product, they move on to product research. This phase usually involves consumer research as well as market research. Experienced product designers consider research as a sensible stage and a proper investment of time. Investing in healthy research at the early stage saves a lot of time and resources along the way by informing design decisions. The research phase varies according to the project as it depends on factors like time, resources, product complexity, and many more and the phase includes:
Analyzing information from the data gathered during the research phase is the goal of the analysis phase. The insights range from what customers need to why they would buy a product. At this point, the most relevant assumptions of the team are considered correct. The analysis phase mainly includes:
During this phase, the product teams work on a variety of functions ranging from Information Architecture (IA) development to the real and final UI design. The active collaboration of every team member involved in the product design process is important for a design phase to be effective and it should be repetitive (as it should go back to validate ideas). This phase includes:
Testing or validation of the product is an important phase in the design process as it allows the team to get better insights into the working of the product when it reaches the customer. The team validates the product with all the shareholders and customers during different series of testing sessions. The phase includes:
In the User Experience Design process, you cannot find a solution that fixes all the problems at once. There process you follow may be different but the objective behind every process is the same – to give the product to your users. Use the best for your project, skip the rest, and expand your UX process with the product’s development.
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