A smooth user experience and intuitive user interface are the prerequisites of a digital product’s success. To create a web app that users love, you need to pay attention to every detail of the web design process.
It’s vital to organize the design processes before development starts. Doing so will allow you to foresee potential risks, ensure that your design will bring value to both customers and your business, and have a precise roadmap.
Each web app design company has their own technique for structuring the web design process. At RubyGarage, this process includes four steps:
- Discovery
- Ideation and information architecture
- User interface design
- Testing and evaluation after launch
This article will dive into each step of our web app design services and give you a complete understanding of what to do if you want to create an outstanding and feasible design for a new product. If you have an existing product that you need to redesign, consider first conducting a UX design review before rebuilding it from scratch.
Step 0: Assemble a team
To get started, identify the specialists you’ll need. The roles your project will require are:
- Product owner
- UX designer
- Business analyst
- Technical expert
- QA and testing expert
Each of these specialists will have their own unique responsibilities at each step of the project.
Step 1: Conduct project and design discovery
Project discovery
First, a product owner should organize a kick-off meeting involving all stakeholders. Over the course of several such meetings, you’ll be able to identify problems and solutions in your industry and niche, define your product’s UVP, and determine customer segments. Also, consider conducting a competitor analysis to find desirable features for your product, set project goals, and define the project strategy.
Through these steps, you’ll assemble a lean canvas for your project, giving you complete information about its objectives and helping you build the project strategy.
Design discovery
Design discovery is a service that helps you define project requirements and major technological drivers to achieve particular business goals. Its main objective is to define project priorities that help shape your design and development life cycle strategy.
This process aims at helping you identify the core problem a design should address and align the needs of stakeholders with project goals. Additionally, design discovery highlights challenges and assumptions, facilitates development, and builds trust within the team, all of which are essential for success.
Business analysts and UX designers should thoroughly investigate:
- Project requirements
- Target audience analysis
- Market and competitor research
- Design best practices
As a result, you’ll get:
- An established communication plan
- A defined value chain
- User personas
- A feature breakdown list
- An audit of existing functionality
With the investigation results, you can move towards idea generation.
Step 2: Start ideation and information architecture building
Ideation
Now it’s time to brainstorm. Designers should identify all possible variants of the best solutions based on the findings of previous research.
As a result, you’ll have a list of ideas and solutions.
Information architecture
After ideation, a UX designer creates an information architecture (IA). The purpose of this process is to define the product’s structure and create product components.
A proper IA helps you avoid usability and navigation flaws and maintain product consistency. A properly structured and search engine–optimized IA guarantees a product’s long-term success.
At this step, designers build a site map, define a clear design taxonomy, and create navigation labels.
The deliverables for this step are:
- Content inventory
- Recommended site map
- Defined user flows
Prototyping
Based on the site map, designers can start creating wireframes and prototypes. These are core components of any website, allowing you to see how it’s organized and how it will function. Wireframes show the organization of the website or app pages, while a prototype presents the visual design.
At the end of this step, you’ll have both wireframes and a prototype of your future website or mobile app.
Step 3: Design the user interface
User interface (UI) design is the process of creating visual components. Apart from being aesthetically pleasing, a UI should be responsive and intuitive for users, directly influencing user acquisition and retention. In addition, an effective UI helps establish your brand identity, making your product stand out.
First, designers should determine the visual direction and layout, decide on the preliminary product structure, and consider the guidelines to follow to get started. Involve a product owner in order to come up with a visual language that aligns with your business needs.
After coming up with a vision of your product’s future interface, designers can create mockups and other graphics like banners, icons, illustrations, and animations. Also, to maintain visual consistency and increase development speed, the design team should consider creating a reference guide and comprehensive style for the project.
After this step, you’ll have:
- A moodboard
- Mockups for all resolutions
- Interactive prototypes
- UI assets (icons, banners, patterns)
- Illustrations
- Animation and interaction assets
- A design specification (style guide, UI kit)
When the user interface is ready, it’s time to test it both in the lab and with real users.
Step 4: Test and evaluate
In the last step, pay maximum attention to testing your design to ensure that the product works as intended.
To do that, a UI/UX designer and a QA specialist should test the product to find any inconsistencies or bugs and provide feedback. In addition to in-house tests, you should also conduct user testing.
User testing will give you insights into how users interact with the product. This step results in a list of issues to be fixed based on data. If there are any inconsistencies in user behavior, use this insights for further product improvements.
To sum up
Designing a product can be challenging since you have a lot of processes that need to be organized. By having a detailed roadmap like this at hand, building a complex product covering business and user needs will be as easy as 1-2-3.
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