User satisfaction is your critical goal in any business in any industry. If you build a great experience for your customers, they will tell each other about it, and you will save millions in marketing.
User experience design (UX) is the practice of enhancing user satisfaction with a product by refining the usability, convenience, and pleasure provided in contact with the product. You want to keep improving satisfaction and testing variations. The UX process is the structure that UX designers follow to get this desired outcome. Depending on your desired outcome and the stage at which team employs a UX designer, the process might change.
Is it a time for user experience project deliverables in your startup? Then this checklist will assist you in different stages of the mission.
Hypothesize a problem. When you are developing a new idea, you have little to no information and it’s hard to guess the perfect solution. First, hypothesize a problem and establish it exists.
**Employ the lean UX methodology. **Listen to and observe your users to get a solid understanding of who your users really are and then build the right product for just those people.
Do a thorough competition analysis. There is never too much of competition research. There are only missed practical details.
**Choose the right KPIs for your product. **Early requirements should outline very clearly how a product should help people. How means both – technically and functionally.
Choose the right research methods. Don’t do research for the sake of it. Choose methods wisely.
**Create user personas. **Remember that poorly constructed personas undermine the credibility of all personas and ignore your audience needs. Ignored customers are lost customers.
Create user stories. When you have user personas, it is time to build User Stories. They will prevent design dead-ends. How? By identifying who the user is, what he/she needs, and why he/she needs it.
Map out user flows. Now that you have identified what they need with user stories, you can quickly make them reach it.
Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.
User flow is the route a user follows through an application. The flow doesn’t have to be linear; it can branch out in a non-linear path.
**Refine red routes. **What are red routes? Red routes should reflect key customer objectives. If your project is e-commerce website, then red road leads to the checkout page.
**While brainstorming, sketch. **Now when you understand your user, you can start drawing.
Create wireframes and/or prototypes. There is a debate about skipping wireframe and going straight to prototype. Why? The responsive design just means that you should create at least three wireframes for each page— one for desktop, tablet, and mobile. Reactive interfaces of interactive design push wireframes out of the process too. You should ask yourself will wireframes be able to cover what you need at this stage. If not – go straight to prototyping. With Adobe XD you can create prototypes in minutes. Switch easily from design to prototype mode right inside the app to keep your ideas going without interruption. Add interactions and transitions and share with teammates and stakeholders to test the look and feel of your design.
Make sure your Information Infrastructure (IA) helps navigate the information and find everything that user might need.
For example, often companies choose audience-based navigation not realizing that forcing people to self-identify is an additional step. Web users and app users are actually task orientated. Let your visitors enjoy their task completion with your service.
Use language that is relevant to the product, user, brand guidelines and helps the user navigate in the application.
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
Make sure that language that you use is translatable. Translation requires validation. Remember that not every joke or concept is translatable.
It costs millions to create a viral product; it costs even more to target an international audience. Cultural expertise is often required to transfer the product to a different audience. Therefore, it is best to plan and use easy to translate and internationally available terms. Translation is perceived as only applicable to words. Therefore, the game industry prefers the term “localization” to “translation.” This says a lot about how seriously game studios take cultural expertise. If it’s your very first product, and you have never thought about internationalization impact on the design while dreaming about global app success, today is the time to include localization strategy in the development process. How to make a localization friendly design? Here are some thoughts.
**Add UI elements to prototype. **To add UI elements, you need to have a ready UI kit. Interface elements include but are not limited to:
To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.
Many apps have intros or journeys into their interface at the beginning that explains functionalities and gestures that control them.
Make waiting time disappear. Speed is critical, especially when working in a remote team or serving clients overseas. Adobe XD allows you to work together, faster. You can send a link to team members for quick feedback on your prototypes. You can share production-ready artwork with developers so they can build to your specifications.
**Acknowledge errors. **Include messages in the right places where error can occur.
**Let the user know about completed actions. **Don’t you love when Asana has beautiful animated Pegasus tell you that you have completed your task?
Finalize layout by using images, icons, fonts, and colors.
**Finalise micro interactions and transitions. **Remember that secret source for a good UX design is micro interactions because they encourage the user to stay in your product and engage.
**Plan a successful A/B test. **Want the secret of successful trials? Always formulate a hypothesis. And use free ideas for inspiration. Now that you have a fantastic interface, carefully test further ideas. There is no end product; there is only the development.