The user's experience is fundamental. It is imperative that any solution, aid them in meeting, if not exceeding their goals. I employ professional UI processes from start to finish for any solution I provide. Now, every company has a slightly different approach to UI documentation, ranging from an extremely detailed process to showing a few employees a wireframe or two. I implore my clients to conduct as much upfront research and design exploration as possible. In my experience, the more UI research that is conducted, the higher the potential of product viability.
UI Outline:
The Design, Business and Technology of Application Development:
What are the user’s goals, motivations and behaviors? These questions are determined along with the design schedule and the development of a form and behavioral spec. In turn, I meet with business analysists to incorporate data considerations such as funding, income and expense outlines, their marketing plans, launch and distribution plans. And in addition, I meet many times with the development community to come to understandings about the core technologies to be used, build-versus-buy components and to review their overall technical plan, engineering schedule and other technical specifications.
The information may also include:
Ethnographic field research, interviews with stakeholders, developers and experts, review of competitive products, market research. This research data helps my team determine user’s behavioral patterns, their goals and defined personas to allow us to shape and define further requirements for the software.
Modeling:
Users and use context is synthesized into domain and user models. Development of further personas and user archetypes. Allows us to group behaviors, attitudes and motivations of our users. This in turn, allows us to create scenario-based models.
Requirements and the Functional Specifications Document:
The connection of user models with other model types. Again reviewing user goals along with business objectives, such as brand attributes, business goals and projections as well as any technical constraints. When this marketing and business data is combined with the design and technical research, the result is preliminary functional specifications document.
Framework:
Based on our functional spec, I design wireframe schematics further illustrating application workflows, overall architecture as well as specific navigational paths.
User Testing:
Every company has different usability testing requirements. I have worked with full scale testing involving full application mock-up and large user group studies to smaller company initiatives that use simple paper-mock-up procedures. Whatever process is implemented, all the gathered observations are analyzed and refined to have some refining process on previous personas, specs, modeling and UI design.
Refinement:
Taking what we’ve gleaned from user research such as model testing and usability testing and refining our solution.
Development and Support:
As we move into the full development phase, I am always involved with any new issues that may arise due to technical requirements, schedule or other possible specification changes.