UX/UI Design Process
In today’s blog, I would like to discuss the UX UI design principles and the general process every design goes through. First step is to always conduct research because it’s important to meet the users and to know your audience. Doing research helps you answer questions such as the purpose of creating this product and for whom you’re making the product for. You can do google search, read articles or use social media and see what your potential users look like and how their behaviors are. This way you know what you want to focus on and who could be the user you need to interview and test your product with. You can conduct simple interviews to see how the user would behave in a certain environment whether they will be interested in a certain product and you could also do surveys such as online surveys using any one of the many platforms. This way you understand the users and know what they want from the design. This is a really crucial step and what a lot of big companies fail to do.
One good thing to do is to create a persona as this will include what the user thinks, what he does, what he wants to do, what he likes and things like this. From all of this information, you can later on build your action plan and see what you need to do. Creating these personas is a very popular way and very useful because it lets you create a certain person as a generalization of a certain type of people that would be interested in your product or several types of people. Based on those personas, you can build user scenarios where the person would need your product or would like to use it. This is what a storyboard is where the designer creates a scenario to represent how the user would think and use the product.
Next, you need to build an ideation map which is just the ideas and a general image of your product and your concepts. You can do user testing and see how users would react to those ideas. Then you generate as many ideas as possible and create the mood boards. This will be useful for you to figure out which design direction to move forward in and will help with future designs you would create. For the Mood board you would put images in a similar color scheme, similar types of images and you would put that all together to see how the colors play together. Once you pick which design direction to go in by doing your research, user testing, feedback from peers etc. then you can move onto creating paper or digital wireframes. So, now it’s time to move on from the conceptual thinking and start inventing the design of your product.
Now, you can use tools such as Sketch, Figma or Adobe XD to create Mid to Hi-Fidelity screens. I have talked about these tools in one of my previous blogs. These screens will contain all the features you and give a very close idea of how the actual product will look like. To get data on how the product will be used and how it will make the users feel, you have to do prototyping. This is where you think of user flows and tasks that the user can complete during user testing to test out the features and usability of the product. There’s a lot of software that are specifically made for prototyping such as Invision or Framer but there are many more. So, if you’re making a digital prototype you got to make a functionality testing to see how well the user will navigate and how to get from one menu to another menu.
I hope that this gave you a little grasp of how the whole process looks like. Good luck in creating human-centric products and don’t forget how important it is to do a thorough research before anything else.
Umair Jeelani
UX/UI Designer
