Hands-On UX Design for Developers: Design, prototype, and implement compelling user experiences from scratch.

Like every other discipline has its own stages or process of development, UX also has its own process for doing it right. However, the problem with the UX process is that it's not always the same; it depends on several factors, such as the size of the project, the category of the project, the targeted users (audience), the problem that you want to solve, your client, and the budget and timeline of your product.

So, you as a UX designer, or the UX team, can define your own process, depending on the factors mentioned in the preceding paragraph. I will walk you through the main stages, which are always important to cover in the UX design process and that depend on your expertise level or on the experience gained while developing your product. You can go back and redo some of the UX process stages or even try to involve some new ideas in your process during the roadmap to product design.

You have to keep in mind that, as a UX designer, you need to have great communication with...

This is the first stage of the UX process where we first touch on/discuss the idea behind our product. It's always a good approach to involve the client here immediately and introduce them to our UX team. Then, together, we can start defining the product scope.

We will start by listening to the client's idea, putting their idea on paper, and trying to understand their idea acutely. In order to understand their idea acutely, we will need to get answers to questions, such as what they want to achieve with this product, their goal, and their targeted audience. This will help the UX team and the client to start giving shape to the product together.

The goal of this stage is that our team should have a clear idea about the product that they will design and develop.

The discovery phase can take up to a few weeks for our team to clearly understand the client idea, their business, their product idea, the problem that they want to solve, and what is important to their users. The...

Let me start this part of the chapter with a real-life story. Almost 10 years ago, I joined a company that was working on creating a new mobile application. The idea behind that product belonged to the company's owner. He'd been facing a problem for a long time and had found a way to solve it. He wanted to try to help other people with the same problem through this application. He was so enthusiastic about his idea and was sure that people would need his mobile application and would love using it.

By the time I joined, the product was almost finished and the owner had spent a lot of time and money developing the product. The only things remaining were some enhancements on design and working on the marketing campaign. After the product went live, nobody was actually interested in his product and those who tried it only did so for a short period of time before they deleted the app. So, in other words, nobody was interested in his service and application.

The difficulty was that...

In the user research stage, we focus on understanding the product itself first, the user's behavior with the product, their needs, their pains, and their motivations for using our products.

Research is the key part of UX process because it prevents us from designing the wrong product. Also, research is considered as one of the key areas of UX itself because it is involved in all the stages of the UX process, so depending on the need for informations on a specific stage, we have to conduct research as many time as required. Imagine that we design a product that nobody wants to use just because we didn't do the research; all our hard work, time, and money will be wasted.

There are tons of reasons why UX research is important; the following are some:

UX analysis is another stage of the UX process. It helps us to measure the interaction between a user and user interface; often, in this case, it can be an application, a digital product, or even the design itself.

You can do UX analysis in different ways and using different approaches. We covered some of them, such as competitor analysis and task analysis.

When we are creating a UX analysis, it is always important to keep in mind all the aspects that are connected with the product we want to build, such as:

Refer to the following diagram:

The UX analysis includes different methods that vary in terms of formality and user participation. Then, by combining the results of these different tests, we will be able to create an overview of who our community is, as follows:

Often, during...

Here comes the exciting part of our product development. After a lot of research and collecting valuable data for our team, now we can start thinking about designing the product itself.

In the design phase, we conduct a meeting with all the other teams in our company, including managers, the marketing team, the design team, developers, sales people, user support, and any other team inside our organization. During this meeting, we unpack all the knowledge and research data that we have collected during the previous UX process stages and show them to the team.

We show to the team all the information that we have collected so far, with no exceptions, as follows:

This is the last phase of the UX process and will continue till the product's UX process lifecycle exists.

The production phase actually can start with the design of the UX process, especially when we start developing our product, since that is the phase where we start giving feedback for a product which we can visually see, touch, and feel.

From my own experience, usually I like to separate the production phase into two parts:

By doing this, it makes it easier for me to leverage the design and do quality assurance and usability testing before the live release of the product.

When the product goes live, the UX team and other teams involved start generating different documents and statistics about the product by measuring the performance that our product is offering.

We can collect data in different ways, as follows:

In this chapter, you learned different areas of the UX process. You need design documentation, which will be complementary rather than supplementary to our process. You learned that you should try to adapt all these techniques to your own needs, and try to understand that it's all about giving to a better design result for your product. So, adapt to the process, methods, and techniques explained here based on your own needs because you do not need to follow them exactly in the order that we covered them.

In the next chapter, we are going to talk more about user behavior and how to conduct proper user research.