User Experience Architect, coined by Apple back in the last decade of the 20th century, has become a separate field for study, development, and design. The UX design process poses an opportunity for software providers to deliver an intuitive, smooth, and pleasurable experience that’s focused on user demands.

Today, UX design has become a must for software development and startup companies to create interactive and attractive products. The revolution brought by Apple in UX design has pushed companies to change their approach and aim at becoming a design-driven company. This means everyone is trying to come up with a functional and convenient version of their products to meet end-user needs.

Ashutec Solutions Pvt Ltd. is also one such company that has adopted the UX design trend to enable our clients with user-centric software products. Our UX design process guides our UI/UX designers to execute simple yet intuitive designs and the same is shared here. But before we get into that, let’s get to know what UX design is.

What is User Experience (UX) Design?

To understand UX design better, let’s break it down into phrases. The first phrase — UX or user experience is how users feel when they interact with your software applications. They may feel varied emotions, senses, and physical stimulations while interacting with software applications.

UX design is where the designers create systems for end-users to experience all those feelings and emotions to satisfy their needs. The process is referred to as the digital design experience of different products and services.

Why UX Designing Matters?

The user experience matters a lot. It helps differentiate between a successful company and its failed software endeavors. It doesn’t matter what innovation has company brought in their products if the users are not able to benefit from it. A user-focused design gives a boost to what the product has to offer, allowing end-users to benefit immensely from it.

Furthermore, UX design is essential to make customers stay satisfied and loyal to your brand. Without the on par user experience, customers will feel annoyed and frustrated with your products which may result in product abandonment.

The UX design differs from product to product and industry to industry, just like Apple and Google. The process for UX designing generally consists of multiple aspects of products that contribute to a good user experience.

Here are the crucial stages of the UX design process:

Stages In UX Design Process

The UI/UX design team at ashutec follows the below described UX design process to come up with unique designs meant to give your business an edge over competitors. We research, iterate, and test everything to give you brilliant UX designs. So, let’s get to know the stages of the UX design process.

1. Understanding

The sharper your axe is the better you’d be able to chop wood. Similarly, the more time we spend understanding the basics before a project starts, the better it is to design any element of your software product. There are two crucial elements we need to understand: Users and Brand.

User experience design essentially addresses the pain points users have. Thus, in order to address them, start by understanding what their problems are. What issues/problems do your products solve? Why do they trust you for the answers to their problems?

Once you understand what problems users face, you’ll feel empowered to come up with solutions and design strategies that address their needs.

When it comes to understanding a brand, you must give it a thought how the project will align with your business goals and vision. It’s crucial to design the UX of a product while keeping the company’s core values and mission in mind.

2. Researching

Once you have clearly understood user needs and brand in particular, the next stage is to conduct research. The research part in UX design is going to be the lifeblood for your software product. The things unearthed during the first stage help the designer team to lay the foundation for the project’s UX design.

Here, your team must challenge any assumptions and use some authentic ways such as interviews, surveys, or usability tests to research. Through these methods, you can find out if the product adequately addresses the user’s expectations and makes them happy or not.

3. Analyzing

Start analyzing the data you have collected through the first two stages and divide them up to find the most important factors. With all those data in hand, you can create user personas or define user journey maps.

User personas describe your ideal customers with their demographics, interests, preferences, goals, motivations, pain points, behavior, spending limit, and many other things. It encompasses answers to all your problems and gives you ideas for the best possible UX design based on your users’ needs.

User journey maps track your users’ interactions with your products. Such maps are crucial and help you build empathy with your users, provide a big picture, bring focus on important areas, break down silos, and reveal further opportunities for improvements. From the research stage, you’ll be able to create user journey maps to better understand your users’ behavior while they go through your products or services.

4. Designing

Finally, a stage where the designers can take center stage and put all the understanding, research, and analysis to good use by building out the designs. Here, the designer team creates site maps, user flows, mockups, images, icons, and colors palettes. Further, they create wireframes and prototypes that represent the essential elements of your software products.

Such notable representations give out the potential designs to be displayed on the pages, outline the design structure and layout, and provide an intuitive user interface. Wireframing and prototypes are iterative, meaning the team has to design, re-design, scrap ineffective designs, and design everything again.

5. Launch

Once all the UX designs are prepared and approved, designers will pass everything to the frontend development team to bring those designs to life from a low fidelity version to a high one. Once the software product is developed and delivered, there are several ways to ensure your product is perfect.

You can either go for user testing, launch a beta version or MVP, or conduct internal testing. Such steps help you get initial feedback so that you can clearly understand issues that arise and address them in a timely manner before the big release.

Final Thoughts

The UX design process doesn’t just end after the final launch, the lifecycle goes on and the right kind of foundation makes further iterations easy. For that, it’s essential the company puts a little effort into researching the market and collecting information about their target audience. Doing so makes it effortless to edit small changes later on when the project grows.