My Design Process  

This is an overview of my design process for UX projects. Based on the project requirements, the following steps are uniquely applied. Using this process helps maintain a user-centered mindset throughout the project and effectively identifies design problems and opportunities.

Research

The design process begins by discovering what the problem is. Methods such as user research, competitor analysis, analytics or indirect user data, and stakeholder interviews are used to gather data about the problem and how to solve it. The foundation of the project is structured upon this, revolving the project around user needs and goals.

Analyze

After gathering data from research, an analysis of the data gathered is necessary to extract useful design insights. This can be done through affinity diagramming, sitemaps, establishing user goals, creating personas to represent major user groups encountered during research, creating user scenarios, and creating positioning maps and semantic differentials.

Ideate

​Brainstorm/generate ideas and identify which ones to pursue and discard. Focus on sketches. Engage in rapid prototyping and iteration with sketches and white boarding. Once user task flows are identified, sketches are turned into wireframes. Conduct usability testing with sketches, wireframes, paper prototypes, or low/high fidelity interactive prototypes to gather feedback and modify designs.

Empathy & Empowerment

It is often easy to lose track of what one is designing for, solely factoring aesthetics and losing track of sustainability, accessibility, & usability. Keeping oneself grounded during this process and tying back in the ideations to the users and the root cause of empowerment & empathy in all regards is vital.

Implement

Once satisfied with results of the prototypes after iterating the design process several times, implementation of designs can begin. Designers must maintain communication with developers throughout the development process to monitor progress and development decisions so that it follows design guidelines, and is a single cohesive outcome.

Repeat

After going through the design process of researching, analyzing, ideating, prototyping, and user testing, it is good practice to iterate the design process to prove ideas and insights, and tie the ideas back to the user research and insights.

Reflect

Always ask what can I do better? What were some challenges that I faced along the way? What would I improve on in future iterations of this design? How did my design decisions impact users? Did it aid to empower users? Did it help to improve ease of experience/usage?