We are what we design.
This is our design motto here at Mobiddiction and we follow a pretty unique and creative practice to make sure we stick to it. As experts, we believe our design practice needs to have a defined and consistent process. Keeping the end customer as our guide, we focus on design steps that showcase a full end to end user experience, and deliver measurable outcomes.
Along with our UX champion, Amy Howard, we’ve put together our step-by-step design process.
Step 1: Application Flow
Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, we place less emphasis on deliverables and a greater focus on the experience being designed. Every project begins with a preparation sprint, where we start from a very top-level strategic view of the project. This very first Sprint is termed as “Sprint Zero” (Discovery) allowing us to interact with the client and gather as much detail as possible.
Most of our programs start with an ideation workshop where we look at opportunities for innovation, problems that need to be solved, and overall customer experience and alignment. It’s also crucial to explore user personas and need states to build a deeper understanding of the program and outcomes, which we then apply to our first Design Process step of creating an app or web screen user flow. This allows us to visually show the key features, user experience flow, and structure of our proposed solution and acts as a base design architecture.
Step 2: Wireframes and User Journey’s
Once we have that base design architecture, we don’t stop there. Based on the app or web screen flow we design more in-depth wireframes to capture the interface elements, functionalities, content prioritisation, and most importantly, how the user will interact with the screen. Building out these wireframes creates a more thorough and extensive map of the full end to end-user journey.
While we are capturing a black and white skeleton representation of the visual elements in the wireframes, we are also working closely with developers to ensure a smooth user experience can be developed. Once we have a well-defined set of wireframes we then create prototypes using tools such as InVision to test the experience as a working app or website. InVision allows you to upload your wireframes and link screens using natural user interaction methods to test how your solution is used and received by different audiences in its desired context.
Taking learnings at this point is crucial and helps us build upon the overall user experience through further workshops and user testing sessions. As part of our Lean and Agile approach, this step can go through many cycles itself as we focus on how to enhance the user journey to create the best user experience or outcome possible.
Step 3: UI/UX Design
The final step in our Design Process is to create a full UI suite of all screens in the end-to-end user journey of the app or website. Here we make sure to include all screens of the solution, including the different user stages so that the client can view the full UX/UI of the final project.
Before starting with any UX or UI, it is imperative to understand what is the brand or business problem we’ve been tasked with solving. We’ve had clients who serve, for example, an older or niche demographic, therefore we needed to ensure the user interface addresses any additional requirements and our design encompasses best practice to meet the user needs.
Use cases are something we stress in our design process as well as constantly considering the value our design would add to the customer. Where and when the user will interact with the app or website is important when designing the interface to allow for a user to achieve maximum usability.
We also have to keep in mind that we’re catering to a multitude of devices including iOS and Android. Each mobile OS can be unique in its user interactions that individuals become familiar with, therefore we need to consider different UX/UI guidelines to build the best user experience.
We are fans of Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and Google’s Material Design Guidelines, which support building a consistent and familiar app experience for the different OS types that allow for simple and smooth user interaction.
“Design is not just about creativity but being pre-emptive in thinking about experience” – MV
