The experience design (XD) process.

Human behavior is constantly evolving. To stay on target with your goals, you must continually identify issues and expose opportunities. The XD process is a series of predefined steps allowing you to observe, ask questions, and seek answers through data, testing, and experimentation. The below XD process is not comprehensive, rather it is meant to give you a broad understanding of how to approach and solve for design.

(Credit to Hasan As ari for the amazing illustration work below.)

01. Strategy

First you need a strategy. And to create one you need to find and analyze the business opportunities. Through investigation and discovery you'll dive deep into assessing any problems before you build an approach to research or an approach to building out design concepts or working prototypes. During the strategy phase you begin asking questions like:

• What problem(s) are we trying to solve?
• Who are we solving it for?
• What outcomes are we driving?
• What is the desired end state?

Though the strategy process you will establish a framework to approach the project that is rooted in business alignment, data, audience validation, and established success metrics.

Workshops

Workshops can be in-person or virtual. Here you discuss business and audience objectives, goals, and challenges with key stakeholders. This allow us to document features and requirements for a minimum viable product (MVP).

Actions & Deliverables

• Business & Audience Insights
• Goals, Objectives, and KPI's
• Initial Requirements

Experience Audit

During the audit process, you leverage XD expertise, best practices, data, and insights to analyze the factors that impact a products value. You'll look at things like how users find you, their perception of your brand, and experience on your system.

Actions & Deliverables

• Brand, UX/UI, Content, SEO Audit
• Content Inventory & Strategy
• Competitive Audit

Stakeholder Interviews

Internal or external breakout conversations or research exercises with client stakeholders and/or sample users may be necessary to determine and define product objectives, goals, or requirements.

Actions & Deliverables

• Surveys, Focus Groups, Interviews
• Card Sorting, Tree Testing
• Usability Testing
  

Personas & Journeys

Both are pivotal artifacts for design teams and client stakeholders alike. They help visualize target audiences and how they might use your product to complete a task.

Actions & Deliverables

• User Personas
• CX Mapping
• User Journey's

02. Design

During design you begin to organize your content and put pixels to screen. When it comes to content, it doesn't matter if you have a website or an app, proper content and information documentation, management, and migration is critical to success. Blog articles or an apps micro copy - it's all part of a system that requires attention. At this time you should also leverage any opportunity to test concepts for architecture, user flows, designs, etc. Testing early and often, even within your own team, will yield better results then no testing at all.

And of course, you can't build any site or app at scale without a well organized and documented design system.

Content Design

Content Strategists use data and insights about your target audiences to deliver the information needed, when they need it, in a way they expect. Content over all other elements can make or break the experience.

Actions & Deliverables

• Content Outlines
• Content Attributes, Types & Modeling
• Taxonomy Documents

Architecture

Our design team creates sketches that connect a product's information architecture to its visual design by showing the pathways between pages, how content will display and where intended functionality will fit into the interface.

Actions & Deliverables

• Rough Blocking
• Wireframes
• Desktop & Mobile Templates
• Mobile Design

Prototype & Testing

Prototyping at an early stage in the process provides design teams the opportunity to validate their ideas and design concepts with stakeholders before visual design and development begin.

Actions & Deliverables

• Hi-fi Prototype Concepts
• Remote User Testing
• 1-on-1 Moderated Testing

UX Content Design

UX Writers create micro-copy to help users interact with a digital product. Content Writers create engaging short and long-form content to fulfill audience needs and drive action.

Actions & Deliverables

• Copy Editing & Content Creation
• Brand Voice & Tone, Writing Style Samples
• Docs, Articles, Blogs, White Papers, FAQs

Visual Design (UI)

Our design team creates a digital product and brand experience that is unique and familiar, accessible, consistent, and predictable, that enables users to complete tasks efficiently.

Actions & Deliverables

• Art Direction
• Digital Asset Creation
• Detailed Interface Design Comps

Design Systems

An interconnected set of interactive components and guidelines coherently organized into a single source of truth that helps design teams operate at scale.

Actions & Deliverables

• Tokens & Guidelines
• Atomic Components
• Patterns & Templates

03. Build

Once the experience has been built, XD's role transitions to a support role. During the build we'll focus on organizing design assets to fit scrum's, coordinate with development teams, perform visual quality assurance (VQA), user acceptance testing (UTA), content migration, and conduct testing of platform functionality (QA). While designs role has throttled back, it's critical to be highly involved while the product is being built.

Digital Style System

A centralized reference for components, design patterns, coding conventions, and documentation, which automatically updates as the codebase evolves, ensuring up-to-date site components for the design and development teams and enhancing overall product quality.

Authoring Guide

For any platform looking to scale an authoring guide for creating and managing content is key. This guide explains users roles, provide guidance with navigating the system, and how to incorporate best practices into the content creation process.

UAT & QA

Here's where we conduct an audit of all the sites built functionality against agreed-upon requirements, including development, design, and SEO QA across both mobile and desktop devices. Essentially here's where the team hacks on the site to break it (in a good way).

Content Migration

Every product build creates new content and refines existing content. Here's where you will create a content migration and authoring plan to ensure that pages are built as designed, and no pages are lost in the process of moving, migrating, or modifying.

04. Growth

During growth we are continually accessing performance metrics and enhancing features & functionality to further advance our goals. Sometimes referred to as “growth design”, at this phase we begin to leverage design to help a business and its products grow. Herein lies a tighter connection and integration of XD and business strategy. At this point we look beyond the project (or product) and begin to evaluate the larger ecosystem surrounding it. As we start to assess possible improvements to the system, and before we begin ANY design, we ask ourselves:

• Do we have a clear customer voice affirming the problem to solve and the desired outcomes?
• Is there sufficient opportunity to drive business value?
• Have we identified critical factors that influence success?
• Have we articulated a validation strategy for testing our assumptions?
• Have success measures been articulated and is there a plan to track and monitor them?

A/B and Multivariate Testing

The best method to drive incremental value from an experience post launch requires hypothesis building and subsequently testing and validating ideas. Our team supports all facets of testing from ideation through to analysis and implementation of winning variants.

Experience Enhancements

As your strategic partner, we'll develop a content management plan to ensure an optimized experience aligned with your objectives, identifying opportunities to refresh, edit, or remove content based on changes in user behavior, business landscape, or new product/service launch.

Site Monitoring & Intercepts

Ongoing monitoring of the systems health and maintenance is essential to maintain a performant and enjoyable user experience. Tools like Checkly, Fullstory, or UserTesting not only monitor up-time but go a step further and allow you to discover insights and validate learnings with higher sample-size studies. All of this is critical in providing user value and ensuring the system is operating as expected.