My Senior UX Designer explains the User-Centered Desing Process with examples

Everyone can have a different idea of what this (User-Centered Design Process) is.

There’s no industry standard, but for me, every business at its core solves the problem. That’s why people come to you for business because you offer the best solution they’re looking for, and as a designer, that’s your job to understand.

You need to understand what the company is working for or the client that approached you. What problem they solve them, and you’ll only ever really know that by talking to the users.

The company might think that the solving this problem but you know what people use things for a lot of different things and you intended most of the time.
That’s why you’ll be like, oh look at this new start-up, it’s done a pivot, and all that means is that they’ve completely changed the direction of business based on the way people are using the product.

So, let’s take a look at the four stages of the concept of the user-centered design process.

But the whole point of this is it’s an iterative circle. It’s infinite. It goes on forever or as long as you’re in business, and that’s important here — a lot of companies. Don’t iterate. They don’t continue this flow. But if you want to be the best like amazon, they go through this all the time. That’s why the websites are not the most pretty looking because at the end of the day, making money doesn’t matter. It’s all about this process, and you only find out a lot of stuff about your business by going through this process. So, the first stage of an intervention is a couple. There are a lot more jobs on the market now for researchers.

So, if you’re into that stuff, you might want to be a researcher. I think it’s an excellent job. A lot of the big companies have significant in-house testing.

So, in the research phase again. Your job is to understand that the problem you’re trying to solve for your customer. And you do that by talking to people there are lots of different techniques you can use.

You can use surveys if you have your customers around the world. You can do one-on-one talking and real-life questionnaires.

There are so many things you can do personas. If based on survey results, if there are no real people there, create fictional people put them on the posters on the walls. Get your whole team involved, understand the customers ask them questions about how they have the company solves problems for them what it’s all about. In this research phase, many ideas and a lot of solutions will just naturally come from this.

So, you know, we’re not asking me to be a genius.

A lot of my ideas come from just digging into research.

You know what? Some of the most obvious things come from there that the company will never think about because they’re not deeply involved in this.

So, research and a lot of ideas will spring from this. That moves us then onto the concept phase and in this phase. This is where all your thoughts from the research phase come into play. Let’s take design out of this, so you don’t get marked on your font choice on how good a designer you are; you don’t get marked any interactions.

Because at the end of the day, for a lot of these companies, that stuff is just icing on top.

Concept face should be but getting these ideas out in public sketching. This is where wireframes come in. In case you wonder, when you look at them, you think, oh, that looks terrible that person doesn’t know how to design, and you know what they might not. But the whole point in wireframes is you take the conversation about design out of the equation.

I’m sure I’ve shown people designs for like a concept which I think is fantastic before on spent days on and they’ll go that’s about wrong, and there’s nothing more disheartening as a designer to hear stuff like that.
Or I’m not too fond of the font. I don’t like that corner color.

Your wireframes make your spell properly do as least design as possible, and people don’t like complex conversations. So, your whole point is to make this conversation very simple. Because you demonstrate and sometimes a complex idea or a complex flow of a website that you’ve designed or an app that you created to make it as simple as possible because people might say I don’t like that button. They’ll completely ignore 99% of what you’ve done?

So, you’re for your job is to strip it back. Talk to the people who you need to talk about the buddy concept to get a signed off? Show it as simply as possible. Papers farm wireframes are fine black and white design whatever you want. Your jobs are to get the concept out to just rough through it a few times, do a few simple tests, and then pass it on into the design phase.
This is where all the art happens, so your work of.
The UI designer who might be someone like me there might be a screen designer. They all work with standard, ever graphic design backgrounds. They’ll work with the design style for the company. Many big companies have a UI language, which is where they stole all their internal graphics.
If you design and like an app, android, or iPhone, the UI designer will know all the icons that they need to use all the rules around the design good design rules aesthetic like whitespace and typography.

They’re the person for all of this. As a UX designer, your job is to bring it to this stage, and a lot of companies combine UX and UI into a new role called product design.

So, you know what you might be. You might be in charge of both. But your design hat shouldn’t come on until the design stage. Once the concepts are finalized, once you know what you’re designing for. Then you put your design together, and then once that’s done, you can package it and work with some corner design, but this is also developed.

So, you work with developers, and you’ll make this thing real, and then before you release it, it goes to your tester. You can test it just with a simple prototype.

I suggest testing as early as possible. So, you don’t waste money on development. Test it with as many people as quickly as you like.

90% of them would be like that buttons too small, or they don’t know where to click, so you’ve got to introduce a new button in there, or they won’t like an image. Like these things will stand out to you, and that’s where the best improvements come from.

It is the things that affect the most people aren’t usually the simplest today. So that will come from testing, and then you know why this is all done, and you’ve iterated like this.
Then you release, and then this is where most companies stop, and that’s like a critical error. You’ve done 90% of hard work the other 10% to make this fantastic, which gives you the most results, by the way? And a lot of people don’t do it because they like to get out the door. They want to shove it on and work on something else, but you need to look at analytics, so most websites or digital products will have analytics built-in. This is where your ex-researchers come in, or anyone just interested in this stuff a product designer might be interested in doing it. But look at your analytics see how people are using it.

You might see people go to people; all take the same journey. You might change your homepage to make it the fourth page in the journey instead of the first page. To save all those drop-offs and save those people, you can do simple things with this stage that will improve it dramatically for everyone. That’s what you need to look at your analytics, and then I can go back into concept design test and so on, but there are a lot of quick wins you can get from looking at analytics.