Creative Process
EMPATHIZE
Using empathy, connect with your user to understand their experience, feelings and needs. Conduct interviews, competitive research analysis and surveys to gather your insights. Creating personas, user journeys, user flows and empathy maps.
DEFINE
Collaborate with the larger team to construct a design brief that clearly outlines all identified challenges based on your research, intended goals and ideal outcomes. The brief should be succinct, meaningful, actionable and user focused.
IDEATE
Orchestrate brainstorming sessions in collaboration with design, IT and other relevant stakeholders to discover a diverse range of thoughts and solutions. Being sure to encourage everyone to participate and assuring everyone that there are no bad ideas.
PROTOTYPE
Build low-fidelity prototypes leaning on defined personas, user journeys and user flows. These visual artifacts support your ideas and tell a more engaging story. Share prototypes with stakeholders, keeping them informed of your progress and a means of gaining support for the final outcome.
IMPLEMENT
Collaborate closely with developers during implementation to provide design assets, relaying important specifications such as spacing and alignment in addition to being an advocate for the user as questions arise. Your job is to ensure the accuracy of the design vision is conveyed in the final product.
TEST
Gather feedback on your prototype by conducting formal usability testing with your users, documenting their experience to refine and improve upon your design. Rapid iteration, testing and qualified feedback is the key to moving a project forward from iteration to design, quickly and intelligently.
LAUNCH
During launch you have the opportunity to digest the experience phase by phase and gather knowledge on the technical process, development efficiencies and dependencies to inform future work, processes and designs. Post-launch is the time to address any design-related issues that come up.
DESIGN
After rounds of iteration, it’s time to create high-fidelity designs based on tested and refined prototypes. Attention is paid to all visual elements and adheres to existing page styling or be updated to current styling as dictated. Cross-functional collaboration should still be part of the process.
EVALUATE
Compromise is all too often part of the process for designers and as such it will be important to analyze the entire experience post-launch. Reflect on what worked well and what should be enhanced in future iterations by suggesting a backlog of future improvements with the development team.