My Process
The Figjam above is what I lovingly call my ‘Candyland Board’ of Product Design – I got the idea from a Lead Product Manager who had a whiteboard file for moving Epics from ideation through to completion and thought – wow! That would really help demystify Design.
So I created my map. You can take any project through the map from left to right, you can work collaboratively with a Product Team to add, remove, or adjust stickies. Edit your Ready agreements, and use it to keep everyone aligned.
Years of experience has given me a unique perspective on how to approach projects. I have worked at everything from large multinational corporations down, to tiny startups and even helped Mom and Pop build their dream e-commerce site. This has lead me to develop a process that can tackle any project and problem to solve.
How I might approach your project:
For existing software I…
Create a sitemap / interaction map of all of the pages, ctas, and touchpoints
Apply all existing persona’s and their journeys to the map to understand what paths users are taking around the application and see what users are doing on the application.
Talk to the product owner or client business and confirm what our top priority journeys are through the application; and example would be on an account manager application we might define ‘Pay My Bill’ as the #1 flow/journey a user is trying to do.
I will reach out to analytics and data science team members for access to any hard data or analytics to the sitemap in relation to the priority journeys, for example, where is traffic coming from naturally, or where do users flow from page to page, and does this meet our Journey priorities
Once identifying pain-points or places we can improve I will usually take existing pages and use them to mock-up possible solutions, this will usually be in photoshop and use screenshots of the already live application so the customer understands what we are trying to accomplish
Depending on the project if we have access to test-users or a have trusted customers I will demo these designs to the customers and get their feedback to determine if the comps meet their expectation; depending on the complexity of the journey this may end up being an clickable prototype in XD or Invision (or other similar software.)
If our users are happy, we’ll confirm with our product owner and IT team to confirm that our prospective solution is viable; if it gets signed off on by all stakeholders we’ll send it to development to get worked on.
For new development I…
Identify the core value statement your new product offering delivers, and work to tie everything back to that value statement. As an example if you’re creating testing software the core value statement might be ‘Highlight the differences between two blocks of code’.
Identify who your users are and build personas around them, the core thing I want every persona to have is a ‘goal’ that that persona is trying to achieve, in the testing software example a QA Engineer may want to highlight changes in code to create a bug; while a Software Engineer persona would want to actually use the highlighted changes to fix the bug.
Create journey maps that each persona would take to reach their goal in the new application, this would usually be created on a whiteboard or in Visio.
Create wireframes of every screen in the application using the flows as a guideline. I usually create wireframes in Adobe XD
Depending on the project we may want to create a clickable prototype of the wireframes to validate that our assumptions in the flow maps are accurate to the journeys we outlined.
Use the flow documents and wireframes to identify all of the pieces you need to create, primary cta buttons, secondary, navigation, etc, and depending on the project I might work a second designer who owns branding to provide me with assets for the final comp. Alternatively I may be creating my own screen elements based on brand guidelines or using existing libraries.
Create a high fidelity mock-up of every wireframe
Create a high fidelity clickable prototype for user testing
Demo prototype to stakeholders, especially in IT, to gather feedback on our designs and make sure they are technically feasible.
Take users through testing of our prototype to gather feedback and make changes until all parties (product, design, users) are happy with the results
Iterate, working with Product/Design/Users/IT until the prototype is ready for development
Work with IT to build it