UX – User experience

UX is basically the most important product development process, as it gives you a deeper understanding of your target audience. At the same time it helps you define your product. Do it right, and you’ll be much better positioned to avoid business-damaging blunders further down the road.

Read on

How to begin

When building a digital company, or creating a product in general, you should understand its different aspects. Here’s some of what you need to know:

  • Why you're building your company/product

  • Who you’re building for

  • The desired result

  • How to track performance

  • How to measure success

  • Who the future customers are

  • How customers can find your product

For more information on defining your startup, read our Idea Validation and Prototyping article.

What, why, for whom?

You should check available analytics, heatmaps, and customer behaviors. By analyzing current statuses and pain points, you can shape the basic architecture of what your product or brand should include. Before designing your digital product, create a screen flow (how things are connected) to have a general overview of the whole project. You’ll also need to develop personas of model users and map their journeys as they use your product.

From these previous steps, you can draw the first sketches and wireframes.

Give shape to your idea, discuss the basic structure, layout, and contents with your team. Do many quick iterations to get the final structures and wireframes to begin the graphic design.

Design

When you start the graphic design phase, it shouldn't be carried out in a subjective, unstructured, and ad hoc way. The knowledge you have gathered up to this point should give you a solid idea of what you're designing and who you’re designing for.

Style guides and mood boards are crucial to stockpiling visual references and inspiration. Clickable prototypes are vital to giving customers an opportunity to experience your product themselves, so you’ll want to build them as soon as you can. Be sure to validate your results and collect user data before and after you launch your product. Data and test results will tell you which features you need to change and tweak, and what those changes and tweaks should be, enabling you to continuously iterate the product.