Designing is a process, not a methodology
According to the Interaction Design Foundation, UX design is about creating products that make the user experience meaningful and relevant. This involves designing acquisition, product integrations, branding, usability and even core functionalities.
To design the best user experience you must follow some key steps. These are understanding pain points and user expectations, making user representations (user personas), identifying how they interact with the interface and for what purpose, and creating wireframes and prototypes.
It is clear that a very important part of UX product design is made up of the methodologies used to correctly and efficiently develop all stages of the project. A methodology is needed to be able to face the design of the user experience, and having it is easier to describe the step by step of the project, getting a clear structure of how it is going to be developed.
One of the most commonly used is Lean UX, which consists of creating user-centred products. This is achieved by asking them directly what they want and how they want it, testing the product as the project progresses and iterating according to the feedback received. By combining all these characteristics, it is possible to increase the product's chances of success, since users have been asked directly about their opinion before the product is released.
This methodology manages to shorten work times, optimizing all productive products, which is what is achieved by following an iterative approach. However, we must bear in mind that each project is a world, and we must not pigeonhole the project using a specific methodology and follow it to the letter.
Although this methodology (and others, such as Agile) has helped in many projects, paradoxically we must apply its main mantra: the most important thing is to adapt. And it is that designing is a process, not a specific methodology.
Each project is different and the best option is to make each process adapted to your individual situation. You can also find another practical function for your project to a tool that was not dedicated to it at first, but using it in an x way has streamlined your work.
Thinking outside the box
How are we going to design and develop new and innovative products if we are not able to think out of the box? It may be that a process that is normally used only in a specific phase can be used at another point in a specific project. We must use the resources we have if they can be useful and facilitate our work, even if it is not in the way in which they are normally used or in the way that you may expect at first.
Think of Coca-Cola: it was born as a drug and later became the top of the most consumed soft drinks in the world, we can also find other useful uses to streamline and enrich UX product design processes. In addition, it is very comforting to find new uses and functionalities that improve your own design process.
At Torresburriel Estudio, for example, we use spreadsheets in some way in each and every one of the areas that the company has. Though spreadsheets are designed to deal with numerical data, it is possible to do an infinite number of things with them, including organizing calendars or mapping the stages of product design and development.
Although the easiest thing is to look at things that are already designed and tested, the best thing about designing new products is that you always have the opportunity to make what you are doing more special than the previous thing and keep innovating.
This article is a translation of the following one published on our corporate website:
