In this phase, we understand the business context and start narrowing down the key targets (users) for the product. Wrapping our head around the product is key to have a good base to build off. Establishing boundaries with collaborators and other stakeholders is key to understanding everyone roles to start pushing our research forward. Understanding our stakeholders (this includes users) and human behavior is crucial for the culture to promote proper solutions. I keep in mind that users aren’t designers, so taking a step back to contextualize their experiences helps drive solutions that will have higher success in live scenarios. A few methods to be able to establish research to build off of are contextual interviews, surveys, diary studies, prototypes, user testing, etc.

Once our research data is collected, we move forward and interpret the data through a variety of methods. A few of these methods to create tangible content for design includes but is not subject to: Stationary (mood boards, quotes, notes overview), common project spaces (colleague meetings), affinity mapping (group reviews, scope refinement, themes, opportunities), personas, and user stories.

Upon analyzing from our previous step, we used the tangible direction to create a design solution. This step is crucial to work with users to ensure that they are best represented in a way where they can fulfill their desired tasks. This phase, we explore options, sketch, validate, prototype, and refine ideas. As the design advances and lands on a solution, it gets moved towards a prototyping phase to test out our ideas with our end users. The benefits of this stage is that we can quickly determine if an idea will work inexpensively, focus on one item at a time, consider different options, and bring our client along in this journey before any finished product gets presented to them.

The final stage of formulating of the design (and development) stage of this UX process. This essentially embarks on the first release of the product (or feature) after we established a confidence in our choices that are supported in the previous stages. Areas that I use in this stage is designing using a prototyping tool, creating style guides, and creating front end templates for components. In this stage, I verify and finalize the visual design elements, content, navigational structures, technical testing, and usability.