Don't neglect UI/UX design, or you’ll most likely have higher than necessary development costs. Make it your competitive advantage.
As our experience shows, companies that neglect UI/UX design can and often do create extra software project development costs.
According to a McKinsey report, companies that focus on UI/UX design can see revenue growth that’s 32% higher than their competitors and stakeholder returns increase by 56%.
This article will guide you through what the UI/UX design process is at various stages of your project implementation. It will also discuss the deliverables you can expect from Solvd professional teams at the end of each phase, how a wise approach can help you save costs and how to equip your product or solution so that it will have a significant competitive advantage.
When To Go With UI/UX Design
Each project is unique and encompasses particular stages. However, there are four basic cases you may commonly encounter when starting or running your software project:
Professionals you need for UX/UI Design Process
On your way to implementing your software project, you will need different professional teams to assist. There are several roles in UI/UX design process, and teams have different goals:
Business Analytics. It is vital to have your business requirements translated into a language that’s understandable for the development team and that also provides sufficient details.
UX Designers. These specialists match both user needs and experience with your business goals and also care about whether a customer uses the product after purchase, how and why.
UI Designers. They transform all of your requirements into a convenient, visually aesthetic and attractive solution.
UX and Marketing Specialists. These specialists work globally for improving your customer retention, developing new sales channels and prospecting.
With that said, let's take a closer look at how Solvd can handle your project at different stages each and the UX/UI deliverables you will receive.
Stage 1. UI/UX Design Deliverables for the Discovery Phase
So, you have a million-dollar idea and you have already researched the market. How will you execute your rough idea?
You need professional business analysts and usability experts to help you identify the target audiences and their needs in order to map out your concept. You can expect our professionals to deliver the following reports:
Job stories and acceptance criteria
User Archetype
Non-functional requirements
Flow diagram
Low fidelity wireframes
Architect review
Project estimation
Each report of UI/UX design deliverables has its own role in the project and is important for the overall result. Let's analyze each one in detail.
Job Stories and Acceptance Criteria
You may wonder why you need Job Stories and Acceptance criteria as part of your UX/UI design process. Yes, you can dish out tasks to the engineers, but that would just be like you are developing blindly. Tasking separately may exceed the project budget, cause confusion and add inconsistencies to the project.
When ___[user role + situation], I want to ____[motivation], so I can ___[expected outcome].
Here is how Job Stories may facilitate and enhance the efficiency of your development efforts and UI/UX design deliverables :
- Job Stories provide context and roles, which allows the team to dive deep into the project and user needs.
- They allow you to accurately plan the project, increase the predictability of the project, simplify monitoring processes for managers, as well as simplify the process of implementing changes.
- The Stories give developers a clear understanding of what they need to complete at a particular development stage.
- Without Job Stories and Acceptance Criteria, you’ll have to waste lots of time communicating with QA and testing specialists and explaining all the nuances to them. Manual and automated testing are both critical parts of software project development, and you can learn more about the importance of Quality Assurance and Quality Control in one of our recent articles.
- When you utilize Job Stories, you receive a valuable detailed assessment of the project before the development starts.
User Archetype
Without having a clear understanding of why it’s necessary to create personas, you may spend more than what was needed from your budget. Let’s clarify: UX personas allow for focusing on real-world clientele with their needs and expectations. They should be created based on market/user research, not just on the vision alone.
Personas are crucial elements in UX design deliverables, and they aren’t intended to inflate costs for a client. They are necessary in order to provide a development team with valuable information. For instance, UI/UX designers will be more interested in learning about the previous experiences your target users have had using different applications. The sales team will be more interested in the users’ age, job position and purchasing motivation.
Creating user personas is extremely helpful in choosing your solution features, thinking out the development processes and creating informed wireframes.
Non-Functional requirements
These requirements of the UX/UI design process describe the way a system should function and involves, at minimum, the following components:
Performance
Accessibility
Adaptability
Audit
Architecture standards
Scalability
Maintainability
Business continuity
Integrations
Security
Key usability points
The report describes the basis of your solution design and helps plan and coordinate future UI/UX design deliverables and the development efforts of your provider's teams.
Flow Diagrams
Everyone who starts working on a project with the UX/UI design process begins to draw User Flow diagrams or Business Flow diagrams inside one's head. It's better to avoid minor inconsistencies from the very beginning, demonstrate the business model and evaluate how the users will interact with the project.
Low-Fidelity Wireframes
At this stage, different nuances may pop up, and they will need to be discussed. If your project is small, professionals may create high-fidelity wireframes, even ones similar to the final design. But if your project is large-scale, it's better to start with low-fidelity wireframes.
Architect review
This report on the UX/UI design process estimates a project scale and gives the developers a view of what they will be working with in detail. It determines whether the existing artifacts are enough to start the development and what their quality is.
Architect reviews help teams to ensure from the beginning that the final solution will be secure and modifiable in the best possible way. It also describes how many unforeseen expenses you as a client may expect and how your solution can be adjusted to save costs.
Project estimation
The basis for this report on the UX/UI design process is the dialogue between a client and the provider. It describes the client's business goals and the type of software solution needed based on information provided by the client.
Business analysts will then dissect the gathered information and create a feature list that will be assessed by each department, including software developers, UI/UX designers, marketers, QA and testers. These professionals will advise the client concerning the number of hours the project requires and the development costs.
Stage 2. UI/UX Design Deliverables for Visual Prototyping
If you have a detailed and documented idea, professional UI/UX designers and consultants can help you visualize it.
Visual prototypes can be basic or detailed and show a solution's backbone and the interaction design that describes the more complicated layers.
Low Fidelity Prototyping
To make clients' ideas tangible, UI/UX designers create low-fidelity wireframes or quick and simple sketches. Such wireframes are usually black-and-white schemes that outline a project as a whole, leaving out the details. Design consultants will use simple boxes and lines to identify the UI design elements.
Low-fidelity prototyping is easy and fast to draw up, but its look is basic. They allow teams to test user features and are best suited for the following:
Planning and designing the user interface
Idea documentation
Brainstorming and discussing ideas within a team
Collecting feedback from a target group
High Fidelity Prototyping
This wireframe is a colorful and interactive representation of a future solution, which is most often used for the following:
Presenting a proposal to investors and stakeholders
Performing user testing to see if the target audience accepts the new business idea. The idea may require modifications before the development starts.
You may easily confuse a high-fidelity prototype for a simplified final design. But that's not true since the prototype focuses on the business flow and data collection, and it also requires considerable upgrades in terms of design.
Stage 3. Research, Analytics and User Testing for Mock-ups or a Working Product
Users often wish to be polite and hide their lack of knowledge about a specific subject. But it’s not enough merely to ask users just a couple of questions. If they’re not asked the right questions, they may give incomplete information in response. Follow-up tests are also needed to know if the chosen paradigm was correct.
Statista reports that 60% of consumers rate usability as an important design characteristic for an online shop.
There are many ways to receive feedback from your target audience regarding the UX/UI design process, including simple questionnaires on social networks and within the product or solution, personal interviews, field research and more. The best method is the one that yields the desired results while minimizing costs. Feel free to learn more about how to hire UX consulting specialists.
Our experience shows that it is important to use quantitative metrics (A/B testing, conversion funnels, user session recordings, click heatmaps, surveys, etc.) to evaluate the performance of the project and its quality.
Stage 4. Deliverables for User Interface Design
You might think that creating something very similar to what Apple, Facebook or Google is doing will save the day. But Merely making copies of popular products that already exist won’t guarantee your success.
MarTech Series says that half of the consumers consider a company's website design crucial to their opinion of that brand.
Instead, our professionals may help you focus on your potential users, create experience maps and choose a relevant visual language. Deliverables for user interface design will shape the progress and processes of your development project.
To create an appealing user interface design, our specialists delve into the following development aspects, the best methods and tools:
Design Style KIT
Final Project Design
Transition Behavior
Animations
Handoff and Design Maintenance during Project Implementation
Design Style KIT
UI/UX design processes require consistency since chaotic efforts in design creation and its visual presentation can lead to complications. Solvd designers deliver clear and well-structured deliverables that facilitate both design and development.
The creation design system is closer to development rules than art. The deliverables for user interface design should be easy to modify while spending as little time as possible on modifications.
Final Project Design
Solvd UI/UX designers appreciate experiments with new trends but keep in mind that what looks good on the surface isn’t always user-friendly and efficient.
There are a few important points that designers should observe when working on making a custom software project successful:
Responsiveness and the smooth running of a solution on both mobile and desktop
Layouts for multiple screen sizes
The environment of a target audience
Convenience
Suitability for color blind and visually impaired users
Transition Behavior
Animated transitions are an extremely important deliverable for user interface design as they help users navigate through an app. Besides, apps that support gesture recognition become easy to interact with, and designers don't need to worry about how to allocate a lot of elements on a single page since gestures undertake some functionality.
Animations
When it comes to designing wow effects or animations for an app, every client tries to find the right balance between effectiveness and costs. Keep the following in mind: what users feel may directly affect the conversion and retention rate. If you neglect the UI/X design process, you run the risk that your audience will thin out rapidly.
Solvd digital designers always try to find low-cost and awesome solutions. Most often, there are several ways to make a particular animation simpler with less load on the development team. In some cases, designers pass on the exported animation as a code file that can be inserted into a client’s project.
Handoff and Design Maintenance
At the stage of design implementation of the UI/UX design process, Solvd specialists synchronize their effort with the development team responsible for a given project. In some cases, it’s enough just to transfer a structured file with different design states. Alternatively, a team may require annotations to supplement the files.
In the course of a project, a client may ask for instant and cheap changes that don’t impact business logic and solution usability. Solvd designers always provide support at every developmental stage of a project, as well as providing assistance with project testing.
Start your UI/UX Design project with Solvd
You shouldn’t overlook professional end-to-end UI/UX design services. It helps your business grow and yields excellent results by letting your clients feel that their interests are a priority and that they get what they need.
Remember that creating an efficient UI/UX solution is never a job for designers in isolation. They will work closely with your engineering, marketing and sales teams and keep the dialogue with clients on track, providing reports at every research and development project stage.
If you follow our guide on the UI/UX design process and deliverables, you’ll successfully meet the needs of your particular user group.
