Design Process
I've seen many iterations of the User Centered Design process. Over the years, based on my own experience and keeping up to date with UX best practices (whilst also learning from UX resources/practitioners), I've been able to work with a template that outlines a general process to use for all my design work.
This template is intended to be modified and tweaked based on the company and the team I work with. It has been incredibly helpful to be able to clearly document the process and communicate that throughout the organization. It not only builds transparency across the board, but it also puts a level of rigor that leans towards validating through data, rapid design iteration, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness — all aimed towards putting the end-user at the forefront.
Documenting the Process
Every work or project I embark upon goes through a rigorous documentation process that gets shared out with key stakeholders, partners from Product and Development, QA, and other disciplines who may be impacted by design - these can include Customer Service Reps, Sale Reps, or Customer Support.
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This documentation will outline each phase in detail along with other information including background, timeline, pain points, and indexes, making sure information is transferable and easily shared to ensure the team is able to efficiently build against their end-user whilst also being able to pivot quickly when the need arises should changes occur in objectives or goals.
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As such, an example of that document might look something like this...
Breaking Down the Process
Discover
In this phase of the design process, we are focused on identifying and understanding who our users are and what their needs might be.
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Business requirements, UX personas, market or competitive landscape research, success metrics, brand vision, and goals/objectives can be grouped into this part of the process as well.
Define
Here, we begin to identify problems users are having with a particular part of a system (if not the entire system).
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We can create user journeys to represent the current set up that gives users problems and also create conceptual ones as hypothetical recommendations. These might look something like this...
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Ideate, Prototype, User Test (Rinse & Repeat as Needed)
Ideate
This is where we typically explore every creative solution we can muster. This can range from quick and dirty napkin sketches, recommended user journeys, to hi-fidelity wire frames.
Prototype
Once we've settled on some conceptual options, we can then begin threading together a bunch of static pages to create a static prototype or even create a more dynamic prototype in partnership with front-end resources to see how the interaction plays out between elements and pages.
User Test
Now that we have a set of prototypes, we can then begin creating a usability test to validate our design decisions. Here, we can collect time completions, success/error rates, and task difficulty. Additionally, we can also annotate some verbal comments made by participants to get more details on interactions. Just to show what a sample test can look like, please take a look below.
Build
Once our designs have been validated, we can then move onto developing the designs into production for our end-users.
Analyze
This portion is pretty straight-forward — once we've developed the designs, we can track its performance through analytics.