Hello readers, we are back with another blog on UX design. This time, we are addressing one of the very important problems that every beginner face while starting into UX design. It is how to start and where to start. This blog highlights the top UX design steps to follow for evert beginner. Let’s jump into in it with basic understanding of user experience.
What is UX Experience?
UX experience refers to the experience of a person while interacting with the products. It includes the user’s behaviour, attitude, emotions, feelings throughout the entire journey. UX design’s motive is to cover all the needs and requirements of the user in a simple and enjoyable experience. There are many ideologies and principles in it as it’s like an art.
This art is in huge demand these days. Experts are projecting a significant growth in the UI and UX market in next upcoming years. But starting professionally into this field needs proper skills-set and practical knowledge. For that our experts have come up with courses in UI & UX design. These programs assist students in building up the core foundation for both UI and mastering UX designing practically.
Top Important UX Design Steps
The important UX design steps come with a design thinking framework and consist of five stages:
- Discover
- Define
- Ideate
- Prototype
- Test
You should start with discovering which means understanding the business thoroughly. Then you move on to defining the problem statement which is to determine what problem is there to solve. Now you can move to the designing in the UX design process for adding personality. Let’s understand them all one by one.
DOUBLE DIAMOND METHOD
1. Discover
There are different ways to conduct a user research, common user research methods can be split into two quantitative and qualitative.
- A quantitative research method is like a survey where it’s actually a questionnaire that you can send out to a large volume of users gather their responses and analyse them later.
- The qualitative user research method there are many ways we can do this.
- For example, user personas, empathy mapping user journey maps, affinity diagram, user interviews, if you ask users open-ended questions, they will be able to answer you something more elaborate. So yeah, this is one of the stages of user design process. Here we talk about discovering our users, how we can understand them better and uncover some useful learnings that we never expected.
2. Define
This stage is to find out what problem is there you’re trying to solve for your users. It will set the right mindset and expectations in later stages. This stage should not just fall on the designer’s shoulder only. The stakeholders also play a part in defining the problem statement.
So, it is a team effort mainly. The problem statement should not be about product metrics or business metrics or technology typically. It can include questions like how might we achieve a goal.
For example, how might we increase the sales for our website versus how might we improve the shopping experience for our users. We might probably find out that the problem statement isn’t right or we will need to go back and understand our users better.
So, yes, we sometimes jump back to the first stage which is the discover stage and do it all over again.
3. Ideate
Once you got the problem statement, you can move on to the most exciting stage which is the ideation stage. This is the part where we go crazy to draft out of the box and think about design ideas.
Here some of the common ideation methods that we use generally are:
- Crazy Eights Sketching
- User Flow Mapping
- Storyboarding
- Mind Mapping
4. The Prototyping Stage
At this UX design step, we build a prototype using a design tool like Figma. It is pretty easy to create prototypes using tools like Figma.
We first build mid fidelity prototypes that is clear enough to help users understand what the design is going to look like.
5. Testing
One of the last UX design steps cover testing part. Once we have the prototype ready. We soon start testing it. Remember, the sooner you test the prototypes, the sooner you will be able to understand how to improve your designs. Before the testing, we will first start by defining the questions that we are trying to ask using a note-taking tool. Then we can schedule a test with the user.
During the testing we first take users’ approval for recording the session in order to observe their expression. We also need to give a brief introduction about why are we doing this testing, who are we and what is expected from the user.
For example, speaking their mind out loud and after the testing we’ll be just going to document those insights in the notes and summarize them. We also present the same insights to our stakeholders so that everyone learns from what we found during the test.
It is also normal to go back and check once you find out that after testing there are things that we could improve. For example, if the checkout experience is confusing to our users then with testing we can find that out quickly. This helps us in that we don’t have to risk having a bad user experience after launching.
Final Step – Launch
When we are done with testing the product in staging, we are finally ready to launch the product. Post launch there are bound to be some bugs or feedback on how we can improve experience. After launching the product you can also ask questions like:
- What worked, what didn’t work, how are the users responding, was the problem solved in the first place, If there are anything that we’re unsure of and need to validate, etc.
We can also implement A B testing to test out which image or copy is more effective. This is the perfect time to iterate on the launched product.
Conclusion Words on Top Important UX Design Steps
The design thinking framework provides a structured list of UX design steps. These steps help in making user experience work smoothly and user friendly. The steps also assist us in understanding the user needs, problems, and providing them creative solutions.
So, it is highly recommended to follow all the mentioned steps for all beginners in UI and UX designing. This whole process helps designers to ensure that user don’t face any problem while interacting with the product. Designers become aware of real problem by following proper stages instead of making assumptions about the users.
Author Introduction
This blog is written by one of our UX design diploma course students Nidhi Kumari. She wrote the whole blog to share her understanding of important stages that she learned during her classes under the guidance of Ravi sir.
