In this article, we break down for you what a UX design process looks like from the start and finish.An overall UX design process contains 5 phases. Each phase is related to a stage of a product development process.A typical UX Design Sprint goes as follows

PHASE 1: RESEARCH & DISCOVERY

This phase is identical to the divergent phase of a design thinking process. It is a crucial part of a design process.At this phase, we decide whether there's a viable opportunity or problem. We hope to create new values for our users by solving the problem or translating the opportunity into a digital application.We believe in an organization, it's everyone's responsibility to keep on discovering new opportunities and identifying problems. Within a UX team, this would be the job of a UX researcher to systematically conduct various results to generate new insights.

PHASE 2: PRIORITIZATION & CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

After we gather a pool of ideas from the previous phase, then it's time to prioritize the most relevant ones at this stage of the product evolution.At any given moment, there's a limitation to how much we can produce. That's why to embark on a UX design endeavor, we'd need to prioritize and create a point of focus.After prioritization, it's to tell a cohesive story in the form of one or a combination of many user stories. One could also call it a UX concept.Like any story, a UX concept or grand story has a hero (your user personas) that needs to solve a problem or reach a goal. Your hero uses your solution (product or service) to accomplish her goal.

PHASE 3: PROTOTYPING & DESIRABILITY-USABILITY TESTING

After finalizing the UX concept, it's time to reverse engineer and translate it into a digital solution (application or a webpage). To do that, you'd need to create prototypes through which we can produce the UX concept.Prototypes are often low-fidelity (crude) presentations of an application that aims to produce an experience (UX concept).The advantage of having prototypes ready is two-fold. It paints a picture of the scope of the application you're dealing with. And second, it'd allow you to test how desirable the experience is for your users.Testing desirability is crucial at this stage that you haven't developed anything and your cost is still considerably lowBecause it could save you millions of euros if you know from tests and your ideas is not desirable enough!

PHASE 4: INTERFACE & INTERACTION DESIGN & USABILITY TESTING

After your prototypes get the pass in the desirability tests, it's time to design pixel-perfect interfaces so you can hand them over to the dev teams for coding. We recommend doing a few rounds of user testing at this point to make sure that there are no usability issues concerning your app.

PHASE 5: HAND-OFF TO DEVELOPMENT TEAM: CREATION OF DESIGN SYSTEM AND GUIDELINES

The last phase is about preparing the interfaces with coding. We often create a design system and guidelines that help development teams to understand all the details that went into designing the interfaces.Increasingly, product teams avoid entering into production mode (phase 4,5) before their concept is fully validated.Production mode is expensive after all and requires the involvement of multiple teams (product, dev, design, marketing, and business teams).As you grow in your profession as a UX designer, you'll be asked to focus more on phases 1,2,3 rather than 4,5.You need to be able to iteratively go from discovering opportunities to developing concepts and prototyping them into digital applications.The faster you can iterate, the more valuable your work becomes towards the way of the success of your organization.Want to learn more about UX Design as well as our services? Check more on our websiteOur community is open to everyone, feel free to join and learn with us: UX DESIGN: Design Pixel-Perfect Applications in Just 3 Weeks