Perfect UX Suit

There is the concept we’re all familiar with in the digital world — User Interface Design.

Clean and beautiful design is expected to be delivered in collaboration with the product development agency. And then, we are faced with another word combination like User Experience, which sounds promising about user engagement and increasing revenue, but still doesn’t give a clear understanding of processes and outputs.

So, what UX design is all about?

Let’s imagine a car. Nice shapes, thoughtful details, fancy interior, big wheels. This is a design worth our money, like a good-looking UI. But is it worth it if a car can’t ride, though? I doubt it. That feels like a poor UX that can’t drive your product anywhere and just costs you a lot of funds.

To avoid this, let's use UX principles of cycled exploring, implementation, testing, and analysis. Let’s have a closer look at UX services and the stages involved considering their duration, participants, and deliverables.

Discovery

Let’s get acquainted, or Stakeholders Interview

You have a product idea. All the information you’re able to share will create a clearer understanding of the product and will setup UX research in the most efficient way. A few arranged calls will help us to define your business goals, and our project questionnaire provides a perfect information structure to understanding your needs.

Tools to use: Google Meets

Participants: Business stakeholders, UX Designer, Business Analyst, Project Manager

Duration: 1–3 meetings

Output: Detailed project questionnaire

Competitive Analysis

Once your product idea is described, let’s investigate your competitors’ product functionality, usability and traffic, strengths and weaknesses, and find out the key difference between them and you. It’s worth mentioning that the product we’re going to create should be better than the competitors’ ones, so there’s no chance of a useless duplicate.

Tools to use: Google Sheets

Participants: Business Stakeholders, UX Designer, Business Analyst

Duration: 1–3 days

Output: Analysis of competitors’ products and possible improvement of UX strategy like this

User Surveys

Okay, now it’s time to get to know our users. User surveys are the most spread method to collect users’ thoughts and feelings by asking them open questions in forms or interviewing them directly.

Here’s a list of places where you can find people to survey:

• LinkedIn and other Social network groups
• Specialized services such as UserTesting, UsabilityHub
• Current users, and word of mouth

As a matter of fact, survey results bring to light favorite features of users and UX issues, as well as predicting user perception of a product launch or new application functionality.

Tools to use: TypeForm

Participants: UX Designer, Business Analyst

Duration: 3–8 days

Output: UX issues, possible new product features, user portrait re-definition

Implementation

User Flows & Scenarios

User Flows & Scenarios are best demonstrated on use-case diagrams, were we describe the user behavior visually by detailing the positive and negative scenarios. A full list of these scenarios should constitute every possible way a user can interact with the product as well as how the product should respond to any unplanned situation.

Let’s take a log-in feature as an example to demonstrate what a positive and negative scenario mean:

• A positive scenario would be when a user logs in successfully.
• In contrast, some of the negative scenarios would be: internet connection error, user forgot credentials, or there is no such user in the system, etc. These scenarios define the type of notification message that would appear or where the next screens lead.

Tools to use: MindMeister, Miro

Participants: UX Designer, Business Analyst

Duration: 2–5 days

Output: Visualized flow of user interaction with an application like this

Site Mapping

The site mapping of a website is a strategic process that sets the tone for the entire product, if done correctly. A site map is a hierarchical listing of the site’s pages. It typically includes content thesis and functionality guesses. This helps determine the overall information architecture of the website, indicates the best logic of navigation, and ensures all necessary items are present and accounted for.

Tools to use: MindMeister, Miro

Participants: UX Designer, Business Analyst

Duration: 2–5 days

Output: Visualised site map of pages

Wireframes

All right, now we’re ready to draw our first black-and-white wireframes to assign functionality to each screen and show the dependency between them. It’s the skeleton of future UI design and the ultimate draft before coloring that needs to be discussed and agreed upon within the team.

Tools to use: Sketch, Figma

Participants: UI/UX Designer, Business Analyst, Business Stakeholders

Duration: 3–6 days

Output: Uncolored wireframes of application

Prototype

Finally, this is the UI/UX phase that allows all the pieces to fall into place. Prototypes are usually created by black-and-white wireframes or colored mock-ups. At this point in the process, the interactive model looks like a working product and is good enough to check user flows, present to investors, and get user feedback.

Tools to use: Sketch, Figma, InVision, ProtoPie

Participants: UI/UX Designer

Duration: 1–5 days

Output: Realistic interactive prototype like this

Analysis

Heat Maps

A heat map is a data visualization that shows patterns of how website users click, scroll, and move through the page. Finding out which CTAs (Call to Action) buttons and links have the most or least clicks, measuring user scrolling, and looking at session replay are the best ways to improve product UX and increase sign-ups or sales.

Tools to use: Hotjar (www.hotjar.com), CrazyEgg (www.crazyegg.com)

Participants: UI/UX Designer, Business Analyst, Marketing Specialist

Duration: 3–5 days, repeatedly

Output: UX design improvements list based on heat maps analysis

A/B Testing

A/B testing evaluates two options on an application page. In this type of testing, the pages look the same except for one UI element. Since the pages are otherwise identical, this allows you to find out which UI option is more effective and why.

Tools to use: Google Optimization

Participants: UI/UX Designer, Business Analyst, Frontend developer, Marketing Specialist

Duration: Repeatedly

Output: UX design improvements list based on A/B testing

UX Design Analytics

As far as UX analytics works on the side of business goals and user engagement, it is important to take time to track an application’s activity of users (i.e. gathering useful data about session duration, pages per session, bounce rate, etc.) along with the information on the source of the traffic.

Tools to use: Google Analytics, SimilarWeb (www.similarweb.com), Amplitude (www.amplitude.com)

Participants: UI/UX Designer, Business Analyst, Marketing Specialist

Duration: Repeatedly

Output: UX design improvements list based on analytics and tracking

Conclusion

UI design and UX improvements are inherent, and the strong combination of both leads to great business achievements. Would you like to see it for yourself? Let’s get in touch on the one-stop shop way to your digital product.