Welcome to the UX Design Process. This blog serves to help you understand the design process by taking a behind-the-scenes look at how we, User Experience Designers, think and work. We hope to demystify the process for anyone who is curious about what we do.

At its heart, user experience design (UX Design) is all about the user. It's understanding how someone will behave when given a specific product or service. Understanding what their goals are, what they need, and what wants they already have (or don't have) is the first step in creating an experience that addresses those needs. The UX design process is really about identifying what the user wants, tracking their actions to determine how they get there, and developing solutions that help them get there faster and more efficiently.

Research

UX design process — Research phase includes gathering relevant information. For example, if the product is mobile it’s important to collect data on users’ devices, platforms and operating systems. Research can also be carried out after the fact, such as during a beta phase, to determine if changes were successful. Another important aspect of research is defining your audience. Before starting the design process, you should identify who your target audience is and why they should be a part of your product.

Design

A decisive action item in a design process is the User Experience Analysis phase. During this phase, the design team performs a rigorous analysis of User cases.  They gather information like what the users actually do when they use the product, how they operate it, and what effects their actions have on the overall user experience. When done correctly, this analysis reveals not just the ideal product, but also how valuable certain features might be to users.

Analysis

The aim of the analysis phase is to draw insights from data collected during the research phase, moving from “what” users want/think/need to “why” they want/think/need it. During this phase, designers confirm that the team’s most important assumptions are correct, and that any alternative designs that are proposed are not significantly worse. This step is not to design solutions, but only to validate that the assumptions were correct in the first place. Once validated, the whole design process can begin again.

Launch

Some things take a while to develop. Others require additional resources—time, money, a change of mind—but they all need to come together for the product to be ready for launch. Product cycles can be long and iterative. At any point during this process many different aspects of the product can change—users, features, functionality, design, and more. A successful launch requires continuous coordination between programming, design, and sales teams during the ideation, design, and testing stages. 

Conclusion

UX design is all about user experience.A lot of people who design products get caught up thinking about visuals and how they should make an impact on the user's mind. Rather than worrying about how a function should feel, focus instead on what users want and how they can get there by interacting with your product in a specific way. This is basically the opposite of what most people think about when they think of user experience.