Design Process

1. Learn about the project

My projects begin with learning about the users, stakeholders, content, and the development stack. Meetings or interviews are scheduled with stakeholders to better understand the scope of the project and implementation limitations. The content is analyzed through content audits and inventories. A review of similar projects produced by other organizations can gain insight of what design approaches have been done that work and what could be done better. Other existing data is reviewed that the scope of the project depends on like styling guides and analytics data.

Deliverables

Content audits, content inventories, and competitive analysis reports.

2. Understanding user needs and business goals

Based on the analyses of the deliverables from the learning phase, a list of business and usability goals are presented to the stakeholder team. These goalse are used to construct ideal questions and tasks for user research. Usability testing of individual or groups of users will be conducted. The results will be analyzed and reported with design recommendations. In addition to these design recommendations, user personas and design principles are also created to maintain focus on scope and the ideal user groups.

Deliverables

User research reports, design recommendations with solid data to support it, user personas, design principles.

3. Information Architecture, Wireframes and Mock-ups

At this phase we begin gathering and organizing the content for this project into a hierarchical structure based on how the content relates to each other. This leads to the creation of concept maps and sitemaps. This help develop a navigation strategy and taxonomy of content. These efforts are followed by the development of wireframes and mock-ups to show how content is organized in a more granular level, how pages will be structured, and what web elements make the most sense to present it. Wireframes are produced to consider for both desktop and mobile visibility. The deliverables can be used for additional user testing to ensure they will successfully meet the users’ needs. This can lead to reiteration efforts but it is less expensive and time consuming to solve usability problems at this point.

Deliverables

Concept maps, sitemaps, information architecture, taxonomy, wireframes, and mockups.

4. Development

Depending on the scope of the project, other steps may need to be taken before the development phase like building a content strategy and finding/preparing a content management system. In the development phase, front-end web development efforts are initiated, including the appropriate widgets/components, page layout, asset preparation (images, videos, documents, and other media), font scheme, color scheme, etc.) There is also coperation with server-side developers to ensure that the expectations of the design are fesible. Continued usability testing is recommended to ensure that the project will produce the intended outcome. Upon production, the project will be deployed to the public. Throughout time the project will need continued maintenance, CMS system upgrades, stakeholder training, and continued usability testing.