UX Process

There are almost as many process charts for UX as there are organizations applying UX methods. Here is just one way of looking at the process. Modify the process to your needs and resources. The most important thing is to make sure that the solutions are suitable to your users specifically.

Discovery

• Website analytics

• Surveys

• Qualitative research studies

• Quantitative research studies

• User and stakeholder interviews

• Customer support staff interviews

• Gather requirements and constraints

• Find allies

• Use all available resources to better understand user requirements. Do not rely only on intermediary or internal sources.

• Set high-level goals in the end of this process stage

Ideation / Exploration stage

Idea generation workshops and tools:

There have been so many great articles and descriptions of idea generating workshop ideas and brainstorming techniques...Here are some of the best:

• How might we

• Crazy Eights

• Affinity Charts and Diagrams

Brainstorming

• Get some great rules for brainstorming from this video by IDEO

• Good insights into brainstorming in Harvard Review

• Articles about brainwriting in Smashing Magazine

• 6-3-5 method explained

• Here are some alternative approaches to traditional brainstorming

• Business model canvas


Writing user stories



Use cases

Once you understand your users, you can build specific use cases. A use case is a written description of how users will perform tasks on your website. It outlines, from a user’s point of view, a system’s behavior as it responds to a request. Each use case is represented as a sequence of steps, beginning with a user's goal and ending when that goal is fulfilled.

Here is a good, brief video about what user stories are and how to write them:

The problem you are trying to solve often has more than one person involved in the decision making, each with a unique relationship with the flow. Based on your research you need to list out these personas. For example:

• Dermatologist who needs to find the best possible treatment for a disease A.

• A PA who needs to make sure that the patient's medical background has been fully captured.

• The patient that needs to understand his or her condition and the treatment for it.

Finally for each player, write down the number of steps required for them to reach their goal. For example, for the dermatologist the steps could be “Look up treatment options for disease A”, “Look up the right starting dose for the medicine”, “Look up follow-up frequency requirements” and “Check if insurance covers for the chosen treatment”.

Example project map


Journey Mapping

Another great way to understand all the different journeys, the personas' touch points with the organization and discovering new opportunities, is Journey Mapping.


Examples of personas and journey maps:


Prototyping and Testing 

If you are designing and developing a completely new feature, new software, a new service that has a big impact on your users, consider creating and testing a prototype before development. Making changes to the prototype instead of the code is considerably cheaper and easier than changing the code. This stage, as well as discovery, will lengthen your project timeline, but is in larger projects well worth the time and effort: Please make sure to take this time into consideration when planning your project and its milestones.