Transcript of The UX Design Process explained step by step with a mobile app project

In today's video, I'm going to explain what the UX design process is step by step using a mobile app project as an example. Just keep in mind that there is no right or perfect design process because every project and team and company are different. So you're going to have to tweak the process to do what makes most sense for you and your team. But with that said, having a process will give you structure and guidance as to how to drive your project, especially when you get stuck and don't know what to do next. Leaning on a process will be very critical. And so to help you visualize how this process can be applied to a real-life project, we're going to be using an example design prompt: redesign the item detail page for an e-commerce mobile app. If you don't know what an item detail page is, just open up your phone and go to any e-commerce website or mobile app like Target or Sephora and you'll see a bunch of products being recommended to you. And if you click on one product, that is what the item detail page is. It is packed with a lot of content and features. This design prompt is very vague and ambiguous and broad because there are so many things you could be working on and redesigning on this page alone. There are so many components to this page, like the product image, the minute interactions of the carousel and the zoom functionality. You could be working on product details and nutrition facts and reviews, recommended products. Whenever I get an ambiguous, broad project like this, having a process helps me get clarity on how to break down this big design problem and also helps me prioritize these smaller tasks based on the impact that our team wants to drive. The process that we're going to talk about today is called the Double Diamond Process, which I'm going to draw out in my reMarkable 2 tablet, which is the sponsor of today's video. You've probably heard and seen the diagram of the double diamond process. First step is to go wide and explore your problem space a little bit more. So this is the Discover phase where you'll be asking what the user and business problems are. You also want to think about what is working well, what isn't working well. So you may want to do an audit of your current designs and start annotating those things. You also want to understand qualitative and quantitative data. So qualitative data can be any user research. Or maybe you want to do a survey to understand key pain points that come up from these customers. Quantitative data is any metric that helps you understand how the current design is performing. So if we take this item detail page as an example, one of the key metrics that we want to look at is how many people are actually adding that particular item to their cart. Another metric that we could look at is how many people are adding the recommended products from this item detail page. What does the conversion rate look like? Doing a competitive analysis can also be really insightful. This is an example of a competitive analysis that I did for this design prompt. I'll block out a few hours, I'll screenshot the competitors and start annotating anything that I'm noticing, any strategies that I'm seeing that our team can also apply. Now that you went wide and have a better understanding of your problem space, you want to narrow down and decide what your team is actually going to fix. So this is the Define phase and this is where you want to synthesize your findings and insights from the competitive analysis from user research, and start deciding and prioritizing what your team is going to work on. So this is where you really want to collaborate with your product manager, data scientist, and eng lead to figure out feature prioritization and product requirements. This is an example list of what you can possibly work on for the redesign of the item detail page. And so my team will go down the list and start prioritizing what has the highest impact and also start t-shirt sizing some of these tasks. T-shirt sizing is just another techie way of saying, let's figure out how big this project is going to be. So if it's a task that's going to take one or two weeks, we'll call it small. If it's a larger project it's probably going to take a month or two. Then you want to go wide again. So this is the Develope phase. You've already scoped out what you're going to be working on. You know the sandbox in which you can play. So this is where you want to go wide in your explorations of your design solutions. What I like to do before jumping straight into Figma is brainstorm ideas on paper because I don't want to spend too much time overthinking it and trying to perfect my initial ideations. I've come to love this reMarkable 2 tablet that feels like paper. So with reMarkable, you can take notes, convert them into text, you can read and review documents without any distractions of social media. I'm trying to cut down on my usage of paper so this is a perfect digital version of my notebooks where I don't have to have paper lying around on my desk. I don't have to carry physical notebooks anymore, and I can access all my notes in all my devices. The best thing about it for me is that I can share my screen while I'm in meetings. So pre-pandemic times I would just draw on a whiteboard my ideas, and have the team give me feedback. But now I can do that by screen sharing my reMarkable 2 tablet to my meeting. Check out the link in my description box to get your own reMarkable 2 tablet. Here's an example of me sketching out different explorations for visualizing the recommended items. Normally we use a horizontal scroll to surface these items. Maybe we can use a grid so that customers can just vertically scroll. The final step is to go narrow and refine your solutions. So this is the deliver phase where you're going to figure out what is going to be actually shipped. So this requires a lot of user testing. I'll usually do two to three rounds of concept testing or usability testing to ensure that my design solution is going to have the impact that we initially wanted to have, and that it's actually solving a real user and business problem. And based on that feedback, I'll make a bunch of iterations. This is where I also share my designs to the broader team, like the comms team, legal team, a lot of cross-functional partners to better understand how my designs are going to impact the business and the other aspects of the business. To wrap this up, if this is what the current design look like, these are the iterations that I'll probably make and then I'll either end up with one or two designs that our team is going to launch. I'd say I spend majority of my time in the last phase because I make a lot of iterations based on the feedback from my team and UX research sessions. I'd love to know what other topics you'd want me to cover. Please comment below and give it a thumbs up if you found this video helpful and I will see you later. Byeeeee