Process

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bprigent.com

process

People

Design is about understanding people’s goals within a specific context, what they do to achieve them and what stands in their way.

People are our source of truth, they are users, decision makers, payers.

Product

Products are chosen and used in order to achieve personal goals.

Rationally, a specific set of easily discoverable and usable features will help reach this goal. Emotionally, an end-to-end experience must create a positive emotional response.

Process

People, contexts, and goals change. Designing a product is therefore a never ending process.

This process should be somewhat standardized for efficiency, but also modular for adaptability. Mine has three steps: Understand, Identify, Execute.

People

Design is about understanding people’s goals within a specific context, what they do to achieve them and what stands in their way.

People are the source of truth, they are the users, the decision maker, the payer.

Product

To achieve said personal goal, a product is chosen and used.

Rationally, a set of features must help reach the goal, be easily discoverable and usable. Emotionally, the end-to-end experience must create pleasure and a positive emotional response.

Process

People, contexts, goals change... and above all, understanding people is an endless task. Designing a product is therefore a process.

It should be somewhat standardized for efficiency but also modular for adaptability. Here is mine.

Summary

Before building a product, I need a certain amount of knowledge. There are different steps and tools to do that.

SOME USEFUL TOOLS

User Interviews

Maze Design

Google Analytics

Hotjar

Google Optimize

Main User involvement

At this stage, users are involved through qualitative interviews and quantitative analysis.

Scoping the project: Mission, timeline, hypothesis

A mission needs to be quantifiable. “Improving an onboarding” is not enough, an onboarding has steps, each step has a conversion, we focus on one. Because there are multiple ways to solve a problem, clarifying the timeline allocated is also important.

To scope the research, I like to use hypothesis statements. Then, the research becomes about proving or disproving them.

Quantitative analysis

Understand Interface and interaction level issues

Help me focus on a specific area for max impact

Help me discover new customer paths to optimize

Drill down even deeper in an CJ area

understand what people wanted out of the website

Quantitative analysis

As I said earlier, a problem arises within a context when a user has a goal. Interviews help me understand this layer: needs, root causes, desires, emotional responses… In a different area, interviews also help me understand mental models (ex: how do users see the product working?)

One thing I always try to keep in mind is interview bias. The way questions are framed is very important and users don’t always understand their own problems.

From Unsplash

Understanding technical and market landscape

I like to talk product ideas with developers early on in a project. Learning about the current and future technological layer gives me insights on feasibility.

A product is always part of an ecosystem. Studying it broadens my mind about problems and solutions. Reverse-engineering (or better reverse-designing) products can also generate new research hypotheses, or uncover new problems.

Summary

People who research are not always the ones who plan or execute. So, this here we summarize and structure findings, then collaboratively decide what to build.

SOME USEFUL TOOLS

Mural

Notion

Drive

Main User involvement

This is more of an internal phase of the design process. Users are involved only if we have trouble moving forward.

Synthesizing people, journey, and pains

Personas are a great way to summarize findings about people, their activities, behavioural traits, wants, frustrations...

After that, I often structure the customer journey by building a story, a visual representation of the chronological steps.

Finally, I use the CGAR framework to structure painpoints by christalizing: Context, Goals, Activities, and Roadblocks. Context is the environment users are in. Goals are users’ personal objectives in that context. Activities are what users do to reach their goals. Roadblocks prevent activities from happening.

Creating design objectives

Now that we have a clear understanding of the people, their problems, and their journey, it is time to create quantifiable design goals.

For this, I like to use the Lean UX methodology and build design objectives using the following framework.

“We will achieve [business outcome] if [persona] can achieve [user outcome] with [feature]”

Summary

Here, I execute the design objectives by following a design process from product requirements to high fidelity prototyping.

SOME USEFUL TOOLS

Whimsical

Figma

Sketch

Adobe Xd

Principle

Webflow

Zeplin

Main User involvement

For product requirements, we use exercises like affinity analysis and card sorting. Then, both moderated and unmoderated testing is done at low and high fidelity level.

Product requirements

This step is about working on the functional and system level of the product, its non visual aspect.

I start by listing features on a document to lay down the main functions that I feel are necessary for the product to work.

Then, I dissect features with user flows that show both user and non-user actions in order to dig deeper into the usability, and the complexity of implementation and operation.

After this, I work on the taxonomy to create a coherent product/information categorization for their persona.

After that, I think about the navigation to create a coherent world where users feel safe and free.

Finally, I use blockframing to visualize the work and communicate it with the different stakeholders.

Low Fidelity

Time to work on the visual representation of the product.
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I always like to start by doing some UX-UI research and ask myself: what existing experiences and elements could be useful here?

Then, I wireframe the product to work on its information and action hierarchy. What do we want users to see and do? vs. What do users actually want to see and do?

I find it useful to prototype at this level of fidelity. It helps me feel the main interactions and features early on.

Identity

Now we focus on the who is behind the product by creating a visual and verbal identity.
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And now that Wireframes have revealed recurring UI elements, building or using a design system to deploy this brand at scale can bring visual consistency and increase high-fidelity efficiency.

High Fidelity

This stage is about iteratively applying the UI Kit to the wireframes, testing the changes through prototyping, and modifying either the UI kit or the interface thanks to the latest learning.

Here, I find that efficiency strongly depends on how well a design software is used (names, groups, symbols, styles...).

Shipping work

Now that the product is designed and we have validated that it will positively affect users’ experience, it is time to deliver the work to the development team.

With performance in mind, I start by creating an assets directory, organized by features or pages.

Tools like Figma take care of documenting interface level information (fonts, colours, dimensions). To document responsiveness, I use the “breakpoint-extremes method” (I design the smallest and widest display for each breakpoint), combined with written instructions if necessary. Finally, to document interactions, I use dedicated animation or prototyping software.

1. Keep a single source of truth
2. Document the experience, not only the interface
3. Use dedicated tools for designer-developer communication

The journey of people meet product.