SKILLS & PROCESS
A good human-centred design process should have empathy at its heart. It should seek to achieve the goals of the business through the lense of its users.
STRATEGY
This phase is focused on understanding the company's short and long term vision, making sure that the UX strategy accurately articulates the brand, the ecosystem it lives in, what it wants to achieve for this project, how we can help measure success, collecting current metrics to do that and understanding the priorities and context of the project.
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STRATEGIC ACTIVITIES
Stakeholder interviews
Framing the problem
Competitor analysis
Analytics review
Heuristic evaluations
USER RESEARCH
This phase of research seeks to learn about the goals and motivations of it's customers or users and to understand their context of use. Findings from analysis of user research should be fed back into the strategy and inform the reframing of the initial brief.
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RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
User interviews
User observations
Contextual enquiry
Card sorts
Surveys
ANALYSIS
Now that we have all that great data it's time to figure out what it all means and extract insights. At this stage we want to show these finding back to the stakeholders (business, subject matter experts and users) to validate any assumptions and hypotheses.
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ANALYSIS ACTIVITIES
Insight generation
Affinity mapping
User needs mapping
User flows
Personas
User journey maps
Service blueprints
IDEATION AND DESIGN
We want to start generating lots of ideas with the project team, stakeholders and users, then narrow these down to the the ideas with the least friction and assumptions attached, as well as check how these ideas map to user needs.
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IDEATION AND DESIGN ACTIVITIES
Design principles
Concept & sketching workshops
Wireframes
Screen flows
Low and high fidelity prototypes
User interface design
Conducting UX reviews
Design systems for consistency and efficiency at scale
PROTOTYPING
Time to prototype the chosen ideas. Low fidelity is good to start with, then increasing fidelity as we go. Sometimes we need a lightweight prototype to test a minor interaction and other times we want to prototype as much of the end-to-end experience as possible, because products live within ecosystems and products are only as strong as the weakest part of that ecosystem.
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PROTOTYPING ACTIVITIES
Paper prototypes
Clickable prototypes
Service or experience prototypes
USABILITY
At this point we need to look at who and where our users are. So we use our personas and key findings picked up during stakeholder and user interviews to inform the usability strategy and create solid protocols that we can use to test with real end-users.
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USABILITY ACTIVITIES
Global usability strategy
Creating protocols
Usability training
Test facilitation
Reporting in regulated industries
BUILD
We have spent some time working through iterations of the ideation, design and test cycles until we have a product or service we want to go forward with and build.
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BUILD ACTIVITIES
Create specifications
Work closely with engineers
Design for unexpected technical issues
MEASURE
We want to see how the product or service is performing in the field. Is it achieving what we set out to do?
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MEASURE ACTIVITIES
Conduct field previews
Surveys
Analytics
Service desk stats