A bit about my Design Process
Caveat: I cannot show my process for from start to finish for my professional work because it would require an NDA, however I can show snapshots from different projects at their various stages.
Ux Design for Software
Understanding the problem/space/area/challenge:
This is first and, in my opinion the most crucial. This is where you understand what it is you are trying to do and what the problem encompasses. You determine the key stakeholders, whether they are users, technologies, existing products/solutions, manufacturing processes or any and everything that is the problem you are trying to solve is affected by.
Being successful is easy, you need to be open minded, document your assumption and don't take any leads by storm. It's important to remain unbiased as you collect all the generative research so it does not skew your research in any particular direction. Distilling the research into key findings, themes, personas, design principles and user flows is also crucial and challenging.
Affinity diagrams can be used to help cluster and organize your findings. The above is an affinity diagram that was create digitally using mural.ly and is the representation of 16 user interviews, contextual inquiry and few surveys. The goals is to start clustering like findings so you can eventually organize them into larger more robust themes.
From the affinity diagram you can uncover user flows, and redistribute your findings into those flows to gain a deeper understanding of the user's painpoints and ecosystems. You can also use the findings as a heat map to better understand where the problem areas lay. This informs the design direction and allows you to distill your research into key insights and opportunity areas.
Unfortunately I cannot share my insights and opportunity areas from the example above due to intellectual property agreements.
This research was compiled and synthesized with Eunice Chung.
If you are working with an existing product, it's important to understand what the product does today. Making an As-Is Journey Map to help identify the strengths and weakness of the current product.
This Journey Map was created with Alexander Braden and Kelly Bailey.
Ideation
This is when you take your key insights and guide them into life with you design principles in the context of your opportunity areas. This should take many forms, like, storyboarding, sketching and building. The key is to produce as many concepts as possible, continuously referring to your research so the concepts remain inline with your findings. You should go through rounds of concept generation and not exclude any ideas as bad ideas until you are ready to evaluate.
Once you have developed sufficient concepts, you can flush them out through storyboarding or full flows. These should remain low fidelity because its inevitable that you will encounter missing elements or scenarios.
By moving into a middle fidelity stage you can flush out more of the details that are otherwise obscured by the lower fidelity. As you work through the details you continuously iterate and refine the concept. Once the concept is at a more refined state you can move into the prototyping phase.
Prototyping and Test
Testing is crucial, it's how you ensure that your product, physical or digital is usable. This can be done in a number of fidelities, whether is be foam models or wireframes.
Taking the feedback from users you can refine your concept to a level as close to perfection as possible. Once you have refined your concept, you can start to apply more detailed visual design, bringing the concept closer to reality.
Testing what is currently available with users provides insight into where the problem areas lay. Here is an example of some feedback from users that was taking into consideration and changed.
Competative Research
It's easy to get stuck in a micro universe. Breaking out and looking at other experiences can help get moving. During this exploration I looked at a few competing products and several that are not associated with enterprise software. While users are accustomed to enterprise software, they also interact with other digital goods like social networks and gaming platforms. I wanted to explore those experiences to get a broader understanding of how these products are presented and organized.
