Process
Approach for creating usable and beautiful products
- Define a problem
- Research
- Prototype
- Test
- Hi-fi/Visual Design
- Deliver
- Validate
Define the problem
Design is not about pushing pixels. It’s about solving problems. So before doing any design job the problem needs to be defined. There are few ways of defining problems:
- Quantitative
Data - Qualitative
Data - Business
Requirements
You could get quantitative data from different analytics tool. For example, on Lebara Community project according to Google Analytics data it became obvious that people don’t use search, but rely on categories much, which wasn’t expected behaviour. Based on this data was made a decision to increase the height of search bar and make it more prominent.
Qualitative data could be received from heuristic/expert evaluation, or user research: interviews and survays
Research
There's a lot of areas of research, that could be done to get more input before creating a product:
- Stakeholders / SMEs interviews
- Competitive research
- User interviews and questionaires
Lo-fi Prototyping
The next stage is to gather all the information and start to create possible solution, starting from the user flows and moving to low-fidelity sketches and wireframes
Hi-fi Prototyping
After creating and testing all wireframes it's time to create a high fidelity prototype. Depending on a complexity of a product it could be just a visual mockups or animated prototypes.
Conclusion
Conclusion Of course the described procces is optimistic but not always it could be achieved in a product developent and the only right solution is to find a balance and remember to design not just for the sake of design but to create the product that people will want and love to use