Product Design Creative Process
While I intend to complete this process of discovery, thinking, and design with every project I work on, in reality, it truly depends on the nature, timeline, and scope of the project.
Co-creation and collaboration are extremely important to me and a project’s success, so it’s key that the design process is fully transparent and open for everyone involved.
I believe every project can be great with the right amount of empathy, curiosity, and willingness to listen and discover.
Empathize
User Research
It’s important to understand the landscape that the project exists in, as well as the target audience we are aiming to reach. I do this by defining/understanding personas based on actual data and insight, while empathising with the user through customer interviews and surveys.
Data
Numbers never lie! I like to keep my finger on the pulse by monitoring data and understanding the underlying user behaviour behind the numbers. I believe a key to a product designer’s influence and impact is to balance business needs, user experience, and customer needs. One way to do this is to set success metrics during the kick-off of a feature, to measure before and after release, in order to monitor the success of a project.
Analysis
After parsing through the research, business objectives and other requirements, I sit down and analyse everything at hand. Now, I can start to pick out the pieces, initiate collaboration with product owners, developers, cross-functional teams and businesses stakeholders and better refine the project scope and requirements.
Define
Problem & Business Goals
It’s important to define the problem statement to include both user and business goals, in order to rally the entire team around a project vision. This helps to set the tone and direction of the project, always keeping in mind the fine balance between user needs and business strategy.
Affinity Map
Collaboratively creating affinity maps from research gives the project a holistic view on common themes, user pain points, and of course, opportunities for creative solutions.
User Persona
From all of the collected research, data and opportunities, I can now form a user persona that will help personify the customer in a way that makes them approachable and easy to understand.
Execute
Sketches & Wireframes
As soon as I have requirements clarified, I start to sketch rough ideas and visuals of a solution. This can look like chicken scratches on a napkin, whiteboard sessions with fellow colleagues (design, product, or other departments!), and/or lo-fi wireframes on Figma. Sometimes the best ideas are #3,120,218 – so it’s important for me to work through the many, many, many concepts or iterations in my brain, before landing on something solid (even if it’s idea #1!).
UI Design
I find odd enjoyment in building and management complex design systems – so it’s always a pleasure to jump into the UI process. With atomic design, the process is streamlined and efficient with an already set design system that is scalable and cross multiple platforms. Any new components or designs, I consult with the wider design team and developers to co-create and co-contribute to our system.
Validate
Usability Testing
Depending on the scope and timeline of the project, I aim to test new features and products with real users (or internal colleagues, if not available) through high-fidelity, clickable prototypes or actual demo testing environment. It’s always important to hear from the customer if what I think is good for the user, actually is (or isn’t!) good for the user.
Reiterate
Collaboration and co-creation are some of the key pillars to success in a harmonious design / product / dev trifecta. Throughout the process, I continuously over-communicate with the engineers and product owner – to get their feedback, ideas, and opinions – thus inviting them along with me in the process. to invite them along in the process.
Based on the feedback, I always make time for improvement and reiteration. At this point, it’s important I also gather enough data and insight to take the design to market with confidence.
Delivery
Grooming & Hand-off
By now, the engineers and product owner have been part of the process at every step, and understand what is coming their way. Final grooming sessions usually are for granular questions, details and developer discussions. Hand-off is a generally smooth transition with continuous feedback and communication between everyone.
At this point, retrospectives and planning are important to discover any hiccups that may have occurred along the way and how we can evolve from them to improve the process.
Reach Out & Let’s Chat!
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