UX Workflows are great to have for anyone doing UI/UX work as it can help set standards for design as well as create an environment for true user-centered design to help solve actual problems.

Why I Made a UX Workflow

As the Lead UX Designer at my company, I’m in charge of all UX related work that’s done for the entire product line up of the company. Seeing that as a potential blocker for myself due to the sheer amount of design work I would have to oversee, instilling a UX workflow across the product teams was a big goal of mine.

Introducing a UX workflow into a company that had never even heard of UX design until 2018 proved to be very difficult as explaining the process of UX can be difficult if others don’t understand the benefits behind UX. That was one of my major pitfalls in my goal to set up a UX workflow as I tended to assume that others held the same value for UX as I myself do.

What I Learned

I had to start at the ground level and learn to communicate the reasons why we should follow a UX workflow, to begin with, and explain the differences between a wireframe and a prototype. I also had to collaborate with a freshly minted Product team and fit the new UX workflow I created into their Kanban and scrum-based project structures.

What I learned in this process is that at the end of the day, UX will always have to balance the needs of stakeholders, product teams, and most importantly users.

UX fights for the user and a UX workflow can help companies make products that users actually want to use.

Overview

My plan with this post is to help others that are in the same boat as I was, trying to create a UX workflow for a company that doesn’t have one or is brand new, and go through the steps that ended up working for my unique situation. The end goal is that you take something away from those steps and apply it to your own process.

Step 1: Strategy

As a group, define the long term goals and strategy of the project at hand. Set priority for the project as well so UX can allow the appropriate time to the project needed to meet the requirements.

This helps UX understand the product team’s road-map for the project as well as align both teams on the goals of that project to ensure collaboration and users are at the core of each project.

Step 2: Research

Research allows UX to be able to properly identify and solve the problem that a product manager is trying to solve with the ask of the project. This helps make sure that UX is truly solving the problem from the start, reducing the amount of time to launch the new project.

Research takes many forms:

• Competitive Analysis
• User Research
• User Feedback
• Technical Documentation

All of these help UX find where the true pain points are which helps align the project more with a user-focused point of view which results in better adoption and user satisfaction when the project is complete.

Step 3: Analysis

With strategy and research, UX is able to thoroughly define the “what” and “why” of the project.

The “what” are the insights from collected data found during research. The “why” confirms the assumptions made during the initial ask of the project.

Proper strategy and research make sure that both teams are aligned on the project and that as a whole we’re solving the true problems that we’ve identified.

Step 4: Definition

Given the what and why of the project, UX takes that information and creates user stories or personas to base the designs created in the next phase off of.

This creates acceptance criteria for the designs to make sure we meet the requirements for the implementation of the project as well as user testing and validation.

We’re able to streamline design with the above outlined which allows us to understand all the aspects of the project that needs to be designed out.

Step 5: Design

Given all of the above, a UX Designer now knows what is required to fully implement the ask of the project. Things like what pages are required, what the layout should be based on, what kinds of actions a user needs to make, and what users will be using the project make the design phase much more efficient.

Depending on the maturity of the project the Designer will determine whether a low-fidelity wireframe or high-fidelity mock/prototype is required for the project.

The end product of this phase is what will be used for user testing and/or development implementation.

Step 6: Validate

Throughout the entire process above we try to fit in testing and validation wherever possible. This makes sure the project is always aligned with solving the end-users problems to create an enjoyable and desirable product.

What it looks like through the different phases:

• Strategy: User feedback to ensure project ask is an actual issue
• Research: User insights into current problems and pain points
• Analysis: Framing the what and why in a manner that will properly solve the problems and pain points
• Definition: Matching user personas/stories to real users to ensure proper definition of the design work required
• Design: testing wireframes/mocks/prototypes to validate design direction