Our design process

Practice makes perfect

Lost in the woods?

Our design process offers a flexible formula for validating and optimising your digital touch points, so that they align as closely as possible to your user’s needs.

HEROIC designers work across websites, mobile apps, software and online systems, new devices and wearables. Customers can’t see the wood for the trees? We can help.

Our UX design process

1. Align

Our first objective is to understand your business goals and get insight into what success looks like for your project.

At this stage it is generally important to stay as broad as possible in our thinking: no idea is a bad idea, and all ideas are worth capturing for future reference.

Methodology

Typically, for us to get a clear picture of where you are and where you are headed, we run workshops that enable us to dive into the detail with you and your key stakeholders.

Depending on the complexity of the project, workshops can last anywhere from half a day to several days and may involve brainstorming sessions, stakeholder interviews and analysis of existing data.

Example deliverables
  • Key features
  • Project scope
  • Product goals
  • Business vision
  • Product roadmap
  • Basic user profiles

2. Examine

The second task we undertake is to get close and personal with your target users.

A solid understanding of the people who are going to use your systems, and the market you operate in, is fundamental to us being able to design with their needs in mind.

Methodology

In this phase we conduct interviews and focus groups with members of your target demographic, to empathise with their needs and frustrations.

Our aim here is to construct a detailed mental model of how the experiences they interact with now and in the future can be crafted to serve them in the simplest possible manner.

Example deliverables
  • Personas
  • UX audits
  • Task flows
  • User stories
  • Experience map
  • Competitor benchmarking

3. Interpret

Thirdly, we move into rapid idea generation to get the creative juices flowing.

We aim to generate as many ideas as possible in this phase, so we have a vast pool of concepts and solutions to draw upon and refine in the next steps.

Methodology

Whiteboarding, sketching and other manual processes are our friends in this phase: we intentionally avoid the detail as the idea is to tease out key concepts and big picture thinking.

Workshops, storyboarding, card sorting and brainstorming sessions are some of the methods we use to progressively stress-test our ideas as we go.

Example deliverables
  • Storyboards
  • Screen flows
  • Priority maps
  • User scenarios
  • Low fidelity layouts
  • Information architecture

4. Distil

In this phase we solidify our thinking into key concepts that we believe will work out in the wild.

We form hypotheses around what to design, and we produce the core experiences to be tested with real-life users.

Methodology

High-fidelity, interactive prototypes are created in this phase, which exemplify the core user journeys to be validated.

The idea is to produce an experience for the participant that transports them into the future vision of the product, so we are in a position to gather robust, measurable feedback that can inform our next actions.

Example deliverables
  • Prototypes
  • Wireframes
  • Design principles
  • Interaction model
  • Design hypotheses
  • Basic visual guidelines

5. Validate

Next, we unleash our prototypes on your users to ensure that our design hypotheses are completely valid.

Validation is a fundamental cornerstone of the user experience design process, and offers your project the absolute best chance of meeting (and exceeding) the expectations of your customers.

Methodology

We use a number of validation techniques with users to get deep insight into how they feel about what we have produced, and that we have hit the mark.

Interviews are often a part of the process, and allow us to get a depth of understanding with a reduced number of users. Simpler surveys, on the other hand, offer statistically significant results across a larger cross-section of a given demographic.

Example deliverables
  • Design critiques
  • Usability testing
  • Guerrilla testing
  • Multivariate testing
  • Heuristic evaluation
  • Quantitative surveys

6. Refine

Now to create pixel perfection, so your interfaces surprise and delight all who use them.

Once we have completed the necessary testing, and are sure of the analysis, we can use our findings to polish and refine the design to a thing of beauty.

Methodology

This phase sees us draw all the magic together: interactions, analysis, business and user needs all come to fruition in a logical, brand-coherent and deceivingly simple set of deliverables that is ready for development.

From the style of each element of the interface to the fully interactive, animated workflow of the entire application, this is the moment we define all the detail, so you can feel confident in starting the coding.

Example deliverables
  • UI style guides
  • Pattern libraries
  • Static visual designs
  • Basic CSS guidelines
  • Animated interactions
  • High-fidelity prototypes
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