Where does UX begin and end?
“UX” is still widely perceived as the activities that start once all the requirements have been decided and end before development starts. This is surprisingly common, but is an example of the wrong way to integrate UX into your project process, whether at an agency or an in-house team.
For a project to be successful, UX thinking must be present across the entire project cycle from inception, through to design and development, and then on an ongoing basis to continuously improve the product beyond launch. In this post we will look at some of the key stages at which UX thinking and practice adds value to your project.
UX design is a strategy of product development and it should be present right from the beginning.
- Marcin Treder, UXPin CEO
Avoiding costly mistakes early on
Have you ever been part of a poorly defined digital project or developed something that was technically excellent but nobody used it? These common mistakes are what the strategic role of UX prevents.
Through facilitating workshops, performing user research and truly understanding the business drivers, UX work at the beginning of a process creates focus around the project. It helps define what the business wants to achieve, what problem needs solving, who it is for and why.
Amongst other benefits, this focus:
- brings project teams together and sets the project on the right route
- ensures you’re designing around both user needs and business goals and finding the sweet spot between the two
- helps to make sure every requirement adds value and removes requirements that don’t.
Creating a blueprint
Once the research and analysis is complete and the project has a focus, we enter the design phase. This is often the phase that people most associate with the term UX.
The design phase takes all the planning work that has been done and puts more definition around what the solution actually looks like. It will often have outputs such as:
- sitemaps
- user flows
- wireframes prototypes
- requirements or “user stories"
However, it isn’t just the design skills that are applied in this phase. Whilst we’ve done everything to ensure our solution will be right, we won’t know if it actually is until we’ve tested it through one or more usability testing techniques.
The UX designer is ultimately a strategist that tailors a well documented plan to build a solution.
- Catalina Rusu, Design Thinking practitioner
Seeing the vision through
At this point the project is in development and a UX designer's job is done, right? Wrong. Whilst the most intense period of the project may be over, there is still work to be done.
The design work carried out so far still needs to be developed into a functioning and stable product that can be released. At this point, a more consultative role is taken on whereby the outputs are reviewed and critiqued to ensure the final solution matches the original vision and meets the required usability standards.
In an Agile development cycle this involvement is even more crucial due to the constantly changing and evolving nature of projects. New requirements must be assessed, designed and tested.
Launch, learn and launch again
One of the beauties of digital is that products or solutions aren’t static, they can constantly change and evolve. There is always more to learn about your users, testing to be done, improvements to be added and new technology to explore.
Projects should be a constant cycle of learning, building and measuring (in various orders depending on the methodology) so just because your product has been released, that shouldn't mean your UX work ends.