Research, Design, Test, Build, Launch, Measure, Repeat.
My approach to a design problem-solving is user-centric, experimental, intuitive and conversational. My process is very simple. It focuses on incremental improvements, iterative release cycles and UX validation and measurement. I don't like to complicate things for anyone. It might sound a bit obvious, but to me it's essential that I understand the problem I’m trying to solve before jumping into design and prototyping. Even better if I try to understand the problem through the lens of the people affected by it directly. To better understand what problems need solving, I take an investigative approach using users and our business goals.
But, what exactly is a design process? Each company interprets it differently, and each designer interprets it differently too. This guide is intended to be a benchmark that you can later morph into the process that ultimately works for you.
Step 1: Research and Discover
The goal is to discover as much data as possible based off of an initial insight. We do this by conducting user research and looking at competitor products. With user and market research, we understand — on a human level — the unfulfilled needs from our users and a competitive analysis of our market space. We audit the constraints of our business and our developers and our timeline. We look at this information as our raw data, our resources, to further decide what problem to tackle.
Establishing your own point of view for your design is crucial to how successful your design can become. Without a point of view, any design is bound to fail. A point of view is how designers tell stories from experience. It is a way of presenting their ideas to give context to a design solution.
Step 2: Define
From the raw data, we find trends and insights that span across different users and scenarios. We shelf problems that are expensive or too ambitious, and select problems that can create a large impact. From there, we select the best problem to solve and move to developing solutions to solve it.
Step 3: Ideate
Now you can focus on how to solve the problem. And similar to how we treat problems, there are also many solutions that can solve a single problem. We begin to ideate any solution that can solve our determined People Problem. We reserve any judgement and think big, wild, and crazy. We surface our information from our research, and create ‘How Might We’s’ or tactical solutions that could work. Overall, this stage is characteristic of ideation, brainstorming, sketches, collaboration, etc. Near the end, you will find trends in these explorations that you will treat as candidates for implementation as long as they fit your constraints like feasibility and impact.
Step 4: Prototype and Test
With a set of promising features, you will explore how they actually interface with people. You will start developing the structure, skeleton, and surface through smaller iterative loops. At each loop you will execute, test, and understand what works and what doesn’t. Evaluation could look like presenting your work at critique, running an AB Test, or showing users a prototype. From here, you learn what implementations work and which one’s don’t, all leading to one solution.
At the end of the day, a true design process is not a set of industry buzzwords. It is the ability to know when to apply the tools that outline best practices, protocols, and rules that improve how we approach specific stages. It is the ability to know how a process fits with scenarios like compromising a shorter timeline, adjusting to an Agile roadmap, or accommodating the goals of another team.