The Design Process
In this article, we are going to learn about the steps in the design process!
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs.
As the power of design lies as much in the steps taken to create it as in the final result. 🚀 It’s always very important to undergo each and every design process. So let’s break it down here.
Let’s start! 😍 I hope you would love this blog.
1- Understand the problem statement 💪
“If I had only one hour to solve a problem, I would spend up to two-third of that hour in attempting to define what the problem is.” — Matthew Wakeman
It’s an obvious step, but skipping it might set you up for failure. Define the problem first. Try to clearly understand
1- Why am I building this?
2- Who am I building it for?
3- What am I building?
Ask your client, stakeholders, product managers the right questions and make sure that you have all the information needed to build the right product for the right audience. Make sure you understand the problem and your goal clearly, why this product should exist, who you’re building the product for, and what their needs are.
2- Research & Analyze ✍
Awesome. Now you got some idea and data about your users. Good research can really refresh your ideas.
(i) Understand market competition
(ii) Learn about your domain
(iii) Get inspirations and understand what your competitors are doing.
After all the necessary research creates user persona, user stories, user flows.
- User Personas: A representation of a type of customer. It can be created by talking to the users and collecting data.
- User Stories: Here think how a person feels, what they are told for, and what they want before they interact with your design.
- User Flows: Understand how the user will move forward with your product? Create information architecture. It’s really important to create the easiest path for the user.
These three things are not always required. As per context, you can put one of them or all of them. It depends.
3- Wireframing 🖋
Now that you know why you’re making this thing and how people will interact with it, it’s time to answer the question: What does it look like?
The wireframes shouldn’t be perfect, but as unique as possible. The goal of this step is to challenge your mind to come up with more than just the first and most obvious solution and to generate a range of ideas that you can pick from or combine.
This is a great way to brainstorm ideas and come up with an amazing solution.
4- Design 👩💻
Now you already have sketches of the product and you know the flow, the next step is to work on the final design. Select theme, colors, typography, iconography, and work on the user interface keeping the user experience in mind.
Always, make sure your UI and UX work well together, easy to maintain, and always be consistent.
5- Test & Iterate 🛠
Coming up with a solution doesn’t help much if you don’t know to measure its success. Now is the time to close the loop and define how you can validate the solution.
To do that ask yourself a question. How would we know that the solution was successful? For that, we need to evaluate the process. Normally, measuring success includes defining KPIs we want to measure and the number that would be considered a success.
Final Words
Building a product is a continuous process. We have to think daily to bring an amazing experience for the user. Take the user feedbacks and work to create a better UX. The process goes on until the desired experience and customer satisfaction is achieved.
You can also check my previous articles on Design here. Hope you find them useful.
Thank you for reading this article! If you find this helpful, do 👏 and share it so that more people can read it. Do comment and let me know your thoughts about this. 😊
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And yes, Happy Designing! :D
