UI Design Process
1 - Brief under standing
Understanding the client’s needs, goals, mission & audience is what will take your design to the next level. The creative brief questions will help you and your client get on the same page about what they want & need out of the results of the project. For example, maybe they want to increase conversions with a new website, or stand out from their competition with a unique brand identity.
Don’t forget to set a schedule, with milestones, deadlines and revisions. This will keep you on track and from getting stuck in an endless loop of revisions. Better yet, include these dates in your contract!
2- Research
Once you have received a brief overview from the client, you can dig into every possible material you find and start researching. During this phase, an expert designer would seek information on the competitors, point of differentiation (POD), market, audience, trends, and future prospects.
The idea behind researching the client’s competitors is to ensure that you don’t copy or make anything too similar. The objective is not to steal a competitor’s idea, as this takes away from any differentiation the company may offer in their market, rather, to understand the lay of the land. Once you have insight into their market and point of differentiation, you can begin to dig into their current and potential customers to understand who you are designing for.
Overall, the purpose of this research is to give you a 360° view of the client's ecosystem and generate ideas that fit the market, industry trends, and the client's customers.
3 - Brainstorm
The combination of the briefing and research will open a path to producing relevant ideas. So, put the pen to paper start brainstorming design ideas.
It's important to remember that each and every element of a design is sending out a message to viewers, from colors and typography to the tagline and symbols. Each element should be given considerable thought before making any hard decisions. The brainstorming process should allow for a creative exploration of how these different elements can work together to support the message. Generate a list of ideas that can be used in the next step, the sketching phase.
4 - Thinking
It might seem like a lot of legwork, but getting this initial research phase done right will help you down the road when presenting your concepts by showing that you made the best and most strategic decisions to reach your client’s goals.
5 - Concept Sketching
Make sure that for your first round of concepts, you stick with sketching it out on paper. If you hop onto your computer too soon - you can get stuck in doing the same old same old. Not to mention get, more easily distracted and getting too wrapped up focusing on the nitty gritty details, like colors, type and general pixel pushing :)
6 - Design
After your project has been approved, it’s time to deliver the final design! As you wrap up your project, your goal is to leave your client over the moon impressed while preparing your work for future success.
To knock this last phase of the project out of the park, put together a “package” beyond sending over a folder full of .jpgs and .pngs. This can include something like a freebie design (maybe a social media banner or business card template) or a simple one page thank you PDF. Get creative and think of ways you can leave your client feeling like they had an awesome experience.
Make sure you keep yourself organized along the way. You can utilize the brief, mood board, strategy, concepts & mockups in your portfolio for an awesome presentation & to attract future clients!
UX Design Process
In UX or “user experience” design, essentially you have a much longer planning phase with additional tasks. UX researchers do additional things such as user research, interviewing, writing personas and job stories, etc. All of these tasks are essentially planning and research that are later used when a mock up is created. (In some agencies and other large teams, UX Designers do not create mockups at all, and a different person, such as a “Visual Designer” creates it.)
The design industry puts a lot of emphasis on UX methods, and rightfully so. These methods result in design work that is more successful because it is based upon data rather than assumptions.
Web Design Process
In web design, the process expands during the build phase. Whereas in other media a designer might not be involved after the concept is finalized, in web design (or similar areas like mobile apps, software design, and other interactive design), projects tend to be large and complex, so these designers stay involved as the concept is built.
Many web and digital designers even participate in building the concept directly by writing code themselves. While not all designers do this, those that do claim this gives unparalleled control over the final details. (Whether designers should write code is a topic of much debate in the design industry.)
Other Types of Design Processes
Other professions use the same design process, for example: engineers, architects, and computer scientists. While the specific tasks that happen during each phase are vastly different (a web designer might create a mock up in Photoshop while a computer scientist might use programming tools) the phases are very similar.
Because every designer tends to adapt the design process and expand/shrink aspects of it to fit their own skills and situation, you might see different names for the phases, or some phases might be expanded and broken down into several separate phases.
For example, a UX Design specialist might split “Research”, “Planning”, and “Testing” into separate phases, where above I grouped them all under “Planning”, and a UX specialist might never be involved during a “Mock Up” or “Build” phase.
Using the design process in your own work
The design process might sound restrictive and limiting, but its purpose is to help you be more creative in the long run.
Many designers like to skip the planning step because it’s not as enjoyable to them, but doing this can cause headaches later when they create designs that don’t meet requirements, for example.
So, by following the design process, you can avoid a lot of frustration—even if it’s not quite as exciting to begin your projects with planning.
However if you do follow the process, you’ll find that when you reach the more creative steps, you’ll have better ideas and you’ll waste less time digging through bad concepts. You’ll also find that you have ideas more consistently and can better estimate how long projects will take you to complete.
Using the process has numerous benefits, and the great thing about process is that if it doesn’t work for you, you can change it. There’s no right or wrong process. All that matters is that your design process helps you create better design. So don’t be afraid to change it! (As long as you don’t skip the planning step!)
