The user’s interaction experience would be negatively affected by any issues with UX or UI. Teams working on the same website or app could approach its development in various ways. However typical steps in completing a project may be identified.
1. Data collection
At this step, you need to get as much information from the client as possible – through a brief or an interview.
The main questions should be about the essence of the site or application – what its task is, how it will differ from existing products, and who the main competitors are. It is also important to form wishes on the approximate structure – how many pages there should be, what you need to show necessarily, and what styles or design examples the client likes.
All this information can be saved in an ordinary text editor and already at this stage schematically sketched out the structure of the product.
2. Analytics
Next, the customer’s competitors should be studied – the list of companies specified by the customer can then be expanded by searching on your own. The task is to:
- To highlight their strengths and weaknesses;
- choose what makes the product different in a favorable way;
- figure out how to emphasize it in the design.
Also at this stage, the target audience is identified and analyzed, and their behavior and how they make decisions are described. For UX/UI it is important to how exactly the audience makes purchases – rationally or emotionally – and what triggers they pay attention to: whether it is price, uniqueness, or availability.
A good example of this approach is Design Agency Washington FuseLab Creative UI, which creates digital interfaces based on intuitive habits and simplicity to maximize usability with minimal effort.
3. Site structure
At this stage, the tasks of the site are defined and the Customer Journey Map (CJM) is developed – all the scenarios of user interaction with the resource are prescribed in it. Usually, a site has one main task – for example, purchase. However, CJM needs to include interactions with other pages.
In CJM, it is common to specify what sources the user used to get to the site, what they decided in the interaction, what might have prevented them from interacting, and how they got to their destination.
4. Site prototype
The prototype is a “skeleton” of the site, which shows its main blocks. In the prototype schematically note what content and what elements will be on each screen, and also think through the logic of interaction between the elements.
It is at this stage that the future functionality of the site is laid down. When creating a prototype, all the information obtained in the previous steps is used:
- target audience behavior;
- scenarios of interaction with the site;
- the developed structure of the site;
- successful “tricks” of competitors.
5. Managing content
What content from the customer will be needed, you can note already at the stage of creating the structure: estimate whether there will be photos, videos, or infographics on the site. However, the prototype will allow you to accurately assess the format of the materials – what size images and text paragraphs should be.
As a rule, the content is supplied by the customer, but the UX/UI designer can give recommendations on what colors and styles to use for photos and videos so that they fit in well with the concept. He can also advise on what is best to write on each screen to catch the user’s attention.
6. Design – UI
Once the prototype is ready, the UI work begins – the designer moves on to developing the visual shell of the site. UI responsibilities include:
- Brand typefaces and colors were chosen after doing prior audience research. In certain circumstances, they are outlined in the customer’s brand book, although only major corporations often provide explicit guidelines.
- Created a basic set of site components, including icons, buttons, input forms, and a search bar. Large projects may be integrated into a UI kit that other designers can work on.
- Visualization shows how users interact with the UI. At this point, the essential animation and micro-interactions are developed. For example, zooming in on banners when the mouse is hovered over or animating buttons after they are clicked.
7. Testing
Once the site is built, it needs to be transferred to a test domain to check how user-friendly the interface is and to gather feedback. Usually, a focus group consisting of representatives of the target audience is recruited for this purpose.
Analyzing the test results will show what problems users encounter and what in the interface needs to be adjusted.
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