Editor’s note: This article was updated by Allie Paschal on 25 November 2024 to expand on the UX design process, provide actionable steps and checklist items, discuss advanced UX design concepts, answer common questions about the UX design process, and refresh visual aids throughout the post.
The UX design process helps UX designers work step-by-step to create a useful feature or product. Though there are many variations of this process, the overall shared goal is to understand the user’s needs and create designs that solve those needs. You can and should tailor this process to create the best solution for your users.
The UX design process is vital to a product’s success because it improves UX, reduces development costs, and facilitates user-centered design. Although this process follows a specific order of steps, each step may vary by project or by team, and you may need to go back to an earlier step when revisions are needed.
Let’s dive in and discuss more about the UX design process. We’ll start with an overview of the process, then follow-up with a few advanced UX design concepts and FAQs.
The UX design process serves as an iterative manual for creating design solutions, meaning the process may look slightly different between UX teams or even project-to-project. You may see different quantities or definitions of steps in some guides; you may find some steps unnecessary for your own needs or might want to add some more.
Overall, the below seven steps offer a baseline for designers to arrange their own UX process for creating solutions to suit the needs of the project at hand:
Let’s go over each step’s expected actions and deliverables – starting with project definition, and ending with launch and iteration.
Before you can run full-steam ahead to any research or design work, your team must align and clarify on the project’s objectives and requirements. Here, you’ll answer questions such as:
Asking straightforward, practical questions like this is beneficial for the entire team because it encourages collaboration, helps set realistic expectations, and reduces feature creep (when a project’s features keep increasing without adding value).
After defining the project comes user research. Here, you can begin to answer questions like:
It’s critical to prioritize users in your design process because if they don’t see a need for your product (or can’t use it), it won’t be successful. User research is also important because it confirms or rejects any bias designers have, as well as helps designers develop empathy for the target users.
Though there are several UX research methods to choose from, we’ll review two common approaches below with interviews and surveys:
Once you have the raw data from your research, you need to review and organize it. This can be a daunting task given all the data to review, but there are methods to arrange the data to find key insights and patterns. Let’s look at a couple ways to analyze the data, then we’ll review methods to present the data to help with the remaining UX process.
Now that you understand your users, the next step is to design and prototype. Here, your UX designs need to balance aesthetics and usability. Users want products with good design elements, but they also must solve their problems. Since you’ve done the research, you know what the user’s expectations are with regard to the UI and its functionality; these go hand-in-hand to create an intuitive user experience.
Once you have designs, you can begin user testing. The testing stage can be done in tandem with the design-and-prototype stage as you iterate designs and need data to support direction. However, you must test the final prototype with real users before handing it off to engineers to ensure there are no usability issues. This validates the design solution by users (or gives you feedback for revisions) and saves money by addressing UX issues before development.
After the designs are tested and finalized, it’s time to give the designs and documentation to your software developers. These developers code the designs into fully functional products, so they participate in design and product discussions throughout the UX process.
Though it’s up to the developers to implement the designs, it’s important that the entire team work together to ensure usability.
Despite being at the end of the UX process, the launch and iterate stage is not the end — it’s a continuous cycle with the designs being improved based on user feedback as well as further product development.
We covered a lot within the above UX design process, but not every design concept you may encounter within each stage of the process. Let’s go over a few advanced UX design topics that you may come across with inclusive design, design systems, and information architecture.
Inclusive design is the practice of creating designs that are accessible and can be used by most people – regardless of their abilities or background. Designing for inclusion means to understand the diversity of users, and to create a user experience that they all can access.
A design system offers a set of recyclable UI components and patterns that help maintain consistency within a product, as well as help teams produce designs and code faster. It’s common for companies to have their own internal design systems, but many open source design systems exist, like Google’s Material Design.
Information architecture (IA) is the practice of organizing the content within a website or app that makes it intuitive for users to navigate, find, and comprehend. IA can be also referred to as content strategy because it deals with presenting content to users at the right time in the right way. Without IA, users can get lost and confused while using a product, leading to abandonment and dissatisfaction.
After digesting the UX design process, you may have some lingering questions. Let’s review some frequently asked questions by designers below.
The length of the holistic UX design process, as well as each individual stage, varies with every project. It can take several weeks to many months, but it’s dependent on the project’s scope, budget, and allocated resources.
For example, a project with multiple new features will have a large scope, so the research and design stages will take longer due to the information and iterations required. On the other hand, a simple project like updating a feature from user feedback, will not take as long since it doesn’t need every UX stage and won’t need as many resources
The tools you can use during the UX design process depends on which stage you’re in. Here are some popular, paid tools per critical stages of the process:
Feedback is one of the most valuable pieces of information you can get during the UX design process. Without it, the project can fail and stakeholders (and users) will be very unhappy.
While getting feedback, it’s best to remain open to both positive and constructive criticism. When showing designs to users, they may give feedback that requires re-work or new designs, but that’s ok. Take the feedback and create better designs that are more user-informed.
And as you receive user feedback, it’s best to sync with stakeholders to share these updates so they’re aligned and have a chance to give their feedback.
Once the project is complete, you want to make sure you got it right. Using web analytics tools such as Hotjar or with surveys, you can monitor metrics like the following:
We’ve covered quite a lot with the UX design process. Though it’s a lengthy process, it’s worth it in the end due to its benefits of an optimized UX and reduced business costs. But remember, the design process is a cycle – so once you’ve launched the product, further iterations will need to be done to continuously iterate and improve the product.
This step-by-step breakdown of the UX design process offers a guide to begin using in your next UX project, but can be customized to fit your project’s needs. For instance, if the target user’s persona is already built, it can be reused in the new project (no need to build it again). Choose the steps that make sense for you and your UX process.
Not only did we review the UX design process, but also discussed advanced UX design concepts with inclusive design, information architecture, and design systems. Then, we reviewed some common FAQs about the UX design process, such as how you can measure the success of completed UX designs.
Now it’s your turn to effectively use the UX design process to create product solutions that solve problems for your users – the ultimate goal of UX design.
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