This is my starting point, a very crucial step before you start designing. Its always a challenge to identify the variation of the requirement. You need to understand the context, focus on the needs & challenges to discover the problem.

Choosing the right stakeholders and asking them well prepared questions based on initial research is very important in this step. Conducting stakeholder interviews and workshops definitely help in articulating the requirements and pain-points.

Whatever data we collect during this UX requirement gathering gets translated into system requirements.

This my next step as a UX professional to deliver the best user experience within the time and budget available.

The project planning phase is all about understanding what you have been asked to do and working out the best combination of activities that will give you the outcome you need, within the time, budgetary and resource constraints of the project.

I create project plan by adding project goals (Why?), Resources & Stakeholders (Who & Where?), Deliverables (What?), Timeline (When?), Methods (How?), Technology Constraints (If any) and Risks, Assumptions, Dependencies (if any).

Being a good listener and observer, I try to understand users by conducting user interviews, contextual inquiries.

Design Thinking begins with a deeper understanding of the people you are designing for. In order to gain those insights, it is important for you as a design thinker to empathize with the people you’re designing for so that you can understand their needs, thoughts, emotions and motivations.

I believe in looking for the underlying factors and motives that drive users’ behaviors and needs is what leads to successful design.

During this phase, I put together the information I have gathered during first few steps and create a persona document. This is where I analyse my observations, some competitive analysis and synthesize them in order to define the core problems.

The Define stage helps me to gather great ideas to establish features, functions, and any other elements that will allow me to solve the problems or, at the very least, allow users to resolve issues themselves with the minimum of difficulty. Here I am actually ready for next step, 'Ideate'.

I prefer to conduct white boarding, card sorting, affinity diagramming activities with the stakeholders. This helps me create some initial concepts, user journey maps along with basic high level information architecture.

This step is really interesting as I start generating ideas by drawing concept sketches. It is important to get as many ideas or problem solutions as possible with the help of information gathered till this step.

Creating wireframes and paper prototypes are some initial activities during this step. This goes through multiple review sessions. After finalizing a particular concept, I start building my visual design strategy.

Using a well researched visual design strategy, I convert the wireframes into clickable prototypes.

When the prototype is ready, I plan and conduct my first few usability tests with actual target users. Usability Test reports help me to improve the proposed concept designs.

Once there is a final concept design ready, I create UI specification documents which are referred by Development Team. Here my deliverables also includes images, icons, typography to use during the actual development.

Finally when the UX solutions that I have provided are launched, there is always a scope for further improvements.

I always wonder on the things I’ve designed, whether they really met their goals. Is my design serving its purpose well, is it working the best it can be, and can it be further optimized?

Conclusion is good design requires a continuous improvement.