MY PROCESS
I often kick off a project with the question “What does success look like for the user?”.
This drives all the stakeholders to identify the primary user, primary use case and the standards we will apply for a successful outcome. Note that this should be agnostic of any technology or approach – just the facts. Something like “A millennial would like to order tickets for a concert in under 30 seconds.”
Sometimes answering this question can take half an hour, sometimes it requires months of research, interviews and validation.
Once we have the answer, and all the stakeholders are on board, we can move on to the next phase: Design. This is where the art comes in. For any user story there are as many solutions as there are designers. However, a great design usually has the following characteristics:
- It delights the user
- Helps the user achieve success, as defined by our use case
- Promotes and supports the brand promise
- It’s scalable
- Follows and/or establishes simple and repeatable design patterns
- Adheres to best practices
- Doesn’t impede other use cases or creates clutter
- It’s visually appealing and professional
- Its voice matches the brand’s voice
- It’s validated by internal testing
The next phase is validating the design with users.
We usually create grayscale, low fidelity interactive prototypes for each use case. This allows the user to focus on completing the task without being distracted by colors, logos, etc. However, all the content and copy should be as realistic as possible, no Lorem Ipsum.
After testing and reviewing the results, we go back to the drawing board, make sure our assumptions about the use cases are correct, refine the prototypes as necessary, and test again. We repeat this cycle, usually two or three times, until we’re satisfied that our design meets the criteria for success.
At this point, we usually create high-fidelity mockups, visually and/or in front-end code, and hand-off to development (there’s more to it than that, but that’s the gist of it).
