- The design process generally breaks down into six primary phases. Each phase requires a different dominant skill. And while some of these skills are complimentary, you rarely find one person who's great at every part of the design process. This usually means that you have a design team with different people specialized in each tactical element, or some combination of elements.
- During each phase, you'll give feedback on the work the design team creates, answer questions about the project's requirements, customer needs, and business needs for the design team.
- Product managers will facilitate any needed communication with the engineering lead or other stakeholders, and shepherd the process along.
- To begin to look at the typical design process, and types of designs you'll encounter, we want to understand that we're entering the process with the product requirements document.
- Just like a product manager, a user researcher in step one, is focused on understanding the customer, what their needs are, what their goals are, what they're using now, and what we can do in the future to improve that.
- The lead designer and the user researcher will often accompany the product manager to the customer interviews. And you'll work together to figure out the user value you want to deliver, business goals to focus on, and the features and functionalities you need to meet those goals and deliver that value.
- User researchers also help with user testing. That's later in the design process, once you build a prototype, user testing will help you learn how well the customer accomplishes the key task using the prototype.
- Once you've figured out what to build, with the user researcher's help, an information architecture designer will figure out how to model and organize the data that we're working with. Information architecture is very much a structured step.
- Asking what information a user should see first, second, third, and so on. They might create a data model explaining how the underlying product will conceptually be represented to the customer, along with the block diagrams expressing in what order to present this information.
- Next the information designers then take the information architecture and figure out how to present it in the product. They're the ones who focus on how a customer navigates through the product. What UI controls you use, how many steps it takes to achieve common task, and more.
- As the skill implies, they're the ones really focused on how you use the product. It's common to find designers who specialize in IA, in interactive design. This is also the step where engineering lead will start to get involved, providing the design team with feedback about the technical feasibility of the designs.
- Design teams will often have prototyping experts who turn these static wireframes into interactive prototypes using anything from HTML to specialized tools like Balsamiq or Envision. Prototypes are incredibly helpful for a number of reasons.
+ First, they help everyone working on the product internally to understand what exactly they are building.
+ Second, the prototype helps engineering provide more accurate estimates for how hard parts of their product will be to build.
+ Lastly, prototypes are incredibly valuable with usability testing.
- After prototyping, you'll move on to visual design. Where the focus is on how the product will look. Your team's visual designers will often work in parallel with people creating the wire frames, establishing the overall look and feel of their product.
- Lastly you'll work with content strategists that determine exactly what to say, and how to say it. So this provides an overview of the design process and the six core elements. And you'll know that your design is complete once the prototypes are validated and proven viable.
