Essentials of UI Design XXXXVIII: Creating and Improving Your Own UX Workflow
Developing and refining your UX workflow ensures your products follow established UX design best practices. This is the secret to keeping your users and stakeholders excited. Do you want to learn how to optimize UX workflows to enhance your digital product design? That’s exactly why I’ve written this article, especially if you’ve signed up to access the world’s most optimized user flows and screens on UILand.
What are UX Workflows and Why Do They Matter?
A UX workflow is a detailed process outline that guides designer activities from conceptualization to design handoff.
Every UX workflow is an adaptation of the five stages of the design thinking process. However, there is no specific workflow method.
The factors that determine a designer’s UX workflow include the product, organizational structure, policies, tools, and so forth. The exact number of steps can vary depending on the organization.
How to Create a UX Workflow
Here are the steps to create a typical UX workflow:
Define the business need
While the goal of UX is to solve problems for users, it does so within the context of the company and product.
UX designers, project managers, and other stakeholders first align on the business need and scope. The business need comprises the project scope, project roadmap, timeframe, and deadlines.it also outlines tasks and objectives, financial and technical constraints, and stakeholder roles and responsibilities.
Conduct research and gain insights
After establishing a clear goal and purpose, the research phase of UX follows. This covers general user research, conducting interviews, user focus groups, surveys, competitor research, and market research.
For established digital products, old research may still be relevant, or usability studies conducted relative to the new project scope.
Analyze research and ideate
Based on analysis of research insights, the UX team can then define user personas, empathy and journey maps, user problems, and pain points. They’ll also consider competitor strengths and weaknesses, while assessing possible business value opportunities.
Create information architecture and user flows
Research outcomes can also be useful as UX designers begin listing and organizing the screens they need to design. You can find screen inspirations from UILand. Used in tandem with the lists, you can start creating the information architecture or sitemap to establish user flows and navigation.
Lo-Fi Prototyping
The IA and user flows enable UX designers to hand sketch wireframes to create low-fidelity paper prototypes. Paper prototyping allows UX designers to collaborate on user flows and identify what elements and components are essential in a product.
Digital wireframing and low-fidelity prototypes follow paper prototyping. The latter use simple click/tap interactions to test navigation and user flows.
Hi-Fi Prototyping
It’s time to convert wireframes to mockups that mirror the final product aesthetics so that you can create functioning high-fidelity prototypes featuring interactivity.
Test, test, test…
Testing is actually an iterative part of the UX workflow rather than one part of it. Always experiment to validate ideas and concepts, but the most critical testing happens with working prototypes. Late usability testing with end-users produces meaningful feedback for designers to make changes, test, iterate, until the product works as intended.
Design handoff
This signals the beginning of development work on the product. It’s necessary to have deliverables and testing all checked off.
Similar to testing, handoff should happen early in the UX design process. Product designers , UX teams, and engineers should meet often to ensure designs meet technical constraints and designers document their work correctly.
Conclusion
The success of UX design largely depends on the adopted UX workflow. However, if you’re an independent product designer or startup founder, UILand offers 150,000+ screens and uder flows tested by seasoned UX engineers from the world’s biggest companies. You can sign up today and stand on the shoulders of these modern-day giants.
