UX process checklist

The user experience is everything today. Everything you do must be optimized to create an exceptional digital experience. The average user shouldnt have to change their behavior to adapt to your product.

Keep this idea in mind when youre turning ideas into user-friendly software.
Weve created this dedicated step-by-step UI/UX design process and deliverables checklist to help you:

• See the UI/UX design process and its main stages as youre developing them.
• Understand what UI/UX design deliverables product owners should get.
• Know how to reduce time and budget risks through actionable UI/UX design steps.

• UI/UX Design Philosophy Explained
• UI/UX Software Design Early Stage: 4 Design Research Deliverables
• Brief
• User Personas
• Screen Sections Scheme
• User Behavior Diagram
• Sketching Ideation Deliverable
• Wireframing UX + UI Design Deliverable
• Visualization [Mockups] UI Design Deliverable
• Slicing Pre-development Stage

But before you can understand the stages of UI/UX designwe recommend learning what a proper design philosophy must include.

UI/UX Design Philosophy Explained

The UI/UX design philosophy is important. But what should your philosophy look like, and what makes up a good philosophy? Here are a few things we think are necessary:

The perfect software lies at the crossroads of user needs, the product owners business requirements, and various other limitations related to technology, time, and budget.

The UI/UX design process traces a path from the abstract to the concrete: from general ideas to specific user interface elements and user scenarios.

When designing software from scratch, never overlook the cost of changes, as they increase over time. The earlier you introduce changes, the faster and cheaper further development becomes.

The UI/UX design phase in software development usually involves a pre-design stage,design research, and four other main stages:sketching,wireframing,visualization, andslicing. Wed like to demonstrate these stages of UX design using MDPlayer as an example. Looking for more information? You can read the case studyhere.

1. UI/UX Software Design Early Stage: 4 Design Research Deliverables

UI/UX designers are the leadingsoftwares storytellers.The more they get involved in the planning and strategy of future software, the more innovative the products they design become.

Design research is the early stage of UI/UX design that happens alongside business analysis. Business analysts and designers often work together to help clients form a more precise vision of a future software product.

The main difference between business analytics and UI/UX design research is that the business analyst creates software requirements from the companys perspective, while the UI/UX designer takes a usability perspective.

At this stage, a full understanding ofpurpose, tasks, and the softwares technical characteristics by theUI/UX agency are essential. The more details UI/UX designers know about a future software product the better the user interface and user experience becomes.

The design research step allows designers to give more preciseUI/UX design estimatesand accelerate the process. Here, UI/UX designers create the following documentation:

1.1 Brief

The brief is the main document that UI/UX designers create at the design research stage. It contains all the required information to start crafting the user experience and the user interface for future software.

An example of the brief document:

1.2 User Personas

The better the design team understands the target audience, the more valuable the software will be.

Personas are generalized portraits of a specific user category based on research and observation. They serve to check whether the software product corresponds to its stated goals.

Here are the required parameters for user personas descriptions:

An example of the user persona document:

User Personas Creation Benefits:

• It helps to gather requirements for future software more effectively.
• It makes estimating the time and costs of UI/UX design more accurate.
• It increases the teams efficiency.
• It makes providing developers with tasks easier.
• It decreases the risk of making mistakes.

1.3 Screen Sections Scheme

Screen sections schemes show the main software sections and the screens within each one. For example, if the software has a Login section, it may contain the following screens:

• Registration
• Login with Facebook
• Login with Google Account
• Forgotten passwords
• and more

The UI/UX designer visualizes all software sections and screens to understand how many screens they should create and how they should interact with one another.

An example of the screen sections scheme:

1.4 User Behavior Diagram

Depending on the tasks, UI/UX designers can create user flows and/or user behavior diagrams. User behavior diagrams, which are more common, are based on sections and screens inside the system. They visualize sections with which users interact to reach their goals within the product.

User behavior diagrams also help UI/UX designers clarify the technical requirements of future software and generate a rough estimate for the design stage.

An example of the user behavior diagram:

2. UI/UX Design Main Deliverables

Once the UI/UX design team has an approximate vision of the future software, logic, user portraits, and the environment and device[s] involvedit starts to work on the main stages. The most important task here is to visualize the logic, interaction, and interface of a future software product.

2.1 Sketching Ideation Deliverable

Sketching is brainstorming. UI/UX designers come up with dozens of ideas, make drawings, and choose the best options. They dont make a detailed interface for each ideabut instead outline the software products visual concept.

2.2 Wireframing UX + UI Design Deliverable

Wireframing is the main stage of UI/UX software design and an important one for visualizing what potential deliverables will look like.

Step-by-step UX design plays a significant role here, as UI/UX designers do the following work:

1. Put requirements together
2. Create the structure of the future software
3. Define the future appearance and set of interface elements
4. Design software navigation
5. Create clickable dynamic prototypes for different roles to understand the interaction

Understanding the products structure allows designers to define the necessity of additional research and choose an optimal technological solution for further development. A software developer should be involved at this stage. The developer gets acquainted with how the product is going to work and look, estimates time and specifics of the development phase, and gives recommendations according to technical requirements and future software capabilities.

QA engineers check and verify UI/UX design according to their requirements at this stage, and prototypes demonstrate the logic, navigation, and fundamental UX interactions of the future software.

Its during this stage that developers introduce corrections. Its important to establish a solution for user task implementation. Take everything into account here because the cost of changes after this stage is extremely high.

2.3 Visualization [Mockups] UI Design Deliverable

The cost of logic and navigation changes here is high, so add any new functionality and roles now. However, its okay tochange colors, styles, or typefaces as the project evolves.

A style guide can efficiently reduce the time devoted to the visualization stage. A style guide is a file containing all the unique elements, conditions of the interface elements, spaces, and typeface sizes present in the final product. Think of it as a set of rules that your design must follow to maintain consistency.

An example of the style guide:

Style guides are also a great addition to the standard visualized examples of 2-3 unique screens of the software product.

The software developer should also be involved at this stage and know about all the visual effects included in the final software product.

2.4 Slicing Pre-Development Stage

This standard procedure begins after the approved start of the development process. Correct slicing means the quality of interface development. After slicing, everything follows the standard procedure. Developers will finally implement the UI/UX design and deliver the product on time to the users, who, in turn, will leave feedback that will influence future decisions.

UI/UX software design stages adjust requirements so that the product owner has a full understanding of the logic and all materials required to start a software development phase. Its essential to pay attention to the UI/UX design to avoid potential time and budget risks during future stages.

Remember, UI/UX design is not just a set of WOW effectsbut the complex analytical process that determines a software products success among users after the release. Thorough planning can go a long way to reducing your design and development costs when it comes to the various stages of UX design.