UX design process

Like most other disciplines, UX design has its own process. UX design follows the user-centered design process, which looks like this:

• Discovery and planning
• Strategy
• UX Research
• Analysis
• Design
• Production

We will go deeper into each one of these in the later chapters of this book, but I will clarify a small point here: what each of this phases includes. To have a successful product result in the end, it is really important to follow all this stages strictly:

• Research: By research, we mean that a statement of work is delivered to the client, with details such as the project's cost, timeline, and what its end result will be. Also, at this stage, team-planning will be included, so this is the initial preparation before starting the project and going deeper into it.
• Strategy: This is the first phase, where we define what goal we want to achieve in this process. It deals with understanding what the benefit of the final product will be.
• Discovery and Planning: This is usually referred as the Discovery phase, and will include a lot of sub-phases inside its life cycle, such as interviews, user research, competition research, observations from users, and different surveys.
• Analysis: Here, you write the insights on the data that you collected from the research phase and then define how UX design can help you with that data.
• Design: This comes after you define clear goals and flows from the previous three phases and put your product to life by visualizing it and designing all the specific flows, refine them, and get input from the users by doing paper prototypes, wireframes, interactions, and UI designs.
• Production: This phase is where all the visual designs are finished, and you validate the product with stakeholders and go through user testing sessions. In this phase, the UX design team has to collaborate a lot with the developers team and guide them to produce a high-quality product.

So, all these six stages of the UX process include the user feedback from the beginning of each stage and during the entire product life cycle.