My UX Design Process
User Experience Design (UX) is a process where the end users are the primary design focus. As brand(s), product(s), design(s), and functionalities all combine into an overall experience, UX Design seeks to ensure the experience is both satisfying and efficient as a whole.
UX matters today, due to the worldwide proliferation of information, tools, services, and goods now available through digital networks. Each requires robust and device agnostic interfaces to be accessible. An efficient and enjoyable experience (while using all of these interfaces) has a powerful and positive impact on users in terms of retention, acquisition, and more.
The UX Design process revolves around incremental iterations and consistent testing/evaluation of all products/services involved in any given use case. It is a multi-disciplinary checks-and-balances POV used throughout all phases of a project. It is meant to keep a project's focus on the end user's needs whenever making decisions concerning design and/or functionality.
I have experience with both waterfall and agile processes, but for any multi-device or responsive project, agile is highly advantageous over waterfall processes overall.
Regardless of the overall process style, my specific UX methods revolve around consistent iterations through the following stages:
- Research
- Analysis
- Stragegy
- Design
- Prototyping
- Quality Assurance
- User Testing
- Publishing
I'm naturally hands-on and interactive with all stakeholders during any UX work. I enjoy design brainstorming sessions and Executive goal meetings, as much as I do a technical code reviews.
When working with designers, I focus on encouraging them to push themselves and the overall level of refinement of the project in terms of consistency, ease, and aesthetic. I can do this through either design applications/workflows or with front end technologies directly.
When working with developers, I focus on efficiency and modularity, and work to bridge the gap between clean code and consistent design through tooling and process tweaks. I'm fluent in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and can work in parallel with any traditional or modern front end development processes.
In particular, I'm a huge proponent of SASS technologies when working with developers. It's amazing how useful this technology is as far as maintaining brand integrity across an entire digital ecosystem of both end users and staff/teams.
When working with Project Managers, I focus on the brand and the business goals of the project. This helps to guide the way interactions and processes amongst design and development teams should be managed, implemented, and maintained.
New features for a digital product or service are both persistently needed and consistently threatening to the overall experience of the product/service. Because of this duality, new features should ideally have a data-driven research/design direction process.
If data is not available, then a competitive and parity-driven research/design process should be used. Regardless, it's important to treat each new feature as both a necessity and a potential disruption to ensure the user experience only improves for end users whenever a new feature is added.
A project I'm proud of is a recent (and surprisingly popular) passion project known as the VainGlory Tools site. It's a series of Single Page Apps built off a JSON data file I maintain on GitHub for the game's community. The User Interface itself was built using a custom Bootstrap 4 SASS Design System I wrote to make rapid prototyping more creative and UX-focused.
I'm proud of the project, because it's been very useful to the community of gamers that play a mobile eSport game called VainGlory (created by Super Evil Megacorp). The project is a good example of "end-to-end" design thinking and development, and is popular specifically because it works on all devices as a responsive set of web tools for any newcomers to the game.
Typically, when a project is executed as an agile project, things don't go off-plan. The pitfall is avoided through a company-wide commitment to action steps derived directly from user feedback. This commitment keeps projects progressing, even if the full vision of the project isn't fully fleshed out yet. We can see examples of this process when looking at modern cloud-based interactive technologies and game development processes.
However, during waterfall processes (especially for web projects), UX Design can go horribly wrong rather quickly! Sometimes tools like InVision, Sketch, etc. set a precedence for a project before the project is created inside it's final medium (I.E. a browser). This difference can lead to expectations that simply won't work in all of the browsers nor across different device screen sizes.
Pivots and last minute changes are inevitable in this situation. Ultimately however, each change risks stripping the project of it's feel of cohesiveness, professionalism, and ease. Since a waterfall process is geared towards "finishing" a project instead of deferring to the next iteration, compromises must be made.
I consider every design compromise to be an example of UX Design going not as planned. After all, someone must ultimately hold themselves accountable and responsible for each battle lost on behalf of the users.
Chasing a sense of perfection from complete strangers through a digital interface isn't for the feint of heart.
The next big trend(s) in UX design will revolve around progressive enhancement, component design/implementations, parallel programming functionality, and possibly GraphQL. Each of these ideologies/technologies will push the user experience towards deeper and more immersive design possibilities for everything from animated transitions to hardcore data functionalities... on any device!
In the world of UX Design (especially on the web), the future is very bright. It is full of potential experiential leaps forward for any team with both a passion for learning and a penchant for conquering design challenges.