Process: Development Process

How can you take your idea for a product and make that idea into a reality? By conducting UX research, you can help your product owner to understand what value your team wants to deliver and determine whether an idea would generate sufficient return on investment (ROI). The product-design and delivery process helps you to successfully design, test, and release good products.

The product-development lifecycle is substantially the same for almost any product—whether a physical product such as a vehicle or electronic device or a digital product for the Web or mobile devices. Some products have very complex, detailed acceptance criteria, while others might have very simple requirements, depending on their significance and influence on people’s lives and the economy. Read More

The rise of the design rock star, the full-stack developer, and various other unicorn breeds, along with the move to make everyone a coder, has made the creation of digital products too focused on metrics—and not enough on quality.

Designing Products, Not Pixels

Companies increasingly pursue design with great vigor and much discussion, but in many ways, with increasingly poor results. The UX design community spends a lot of time arguing which screen-design tool is best and talk about screen-design workflow with a straight face, while most junior designers have never actually designed an information architecture. Read More

“It is widely accepted that creative design is not a matter of first fixing the problem and then searching for a satisfactory solution concept; instead it seems more to be a matter of developing and refining together both the formulation of the problem and ideas for its solution, with constant iteration of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation processes between the two “spaces”—problem and solution.”—Nigel Cross and Kees Dorst, in “Co-evolution of Problem and Solution Spaces in Creative Design,” 1999.

If my work in UX design holds any truth, it is that everything could change. On every project, we search for two qualities in parallel: a deeper understanding of the problem at hand and better solutions for it. Constant changes in both the problem and solution spaces are the fundamental forces underlying the UX design process. Read More