Process: Development Process

How can you take your idea for a product and make that idea into a reality? By conducting UX research, you can help your product owner to understand what value your team wants to deliver and determine whether an idea would generate sufficient return on investment (ROI). The product-design and delivery process helps you to successfully design, test, and release good products.

The product-development lifecycle is substantially the same for almost any product—whether a physical product such as a vehicle or electronic device or a digital product for the Web or mobile devices. Some products have very complex, detailed acceptance criteria, while others might have very simple requirements, depending on their significance and influence on people’s lives and the economy. Read More

Choose a blank sheet of white paper. Put a black dot in the center. Give it to someone and ask what they see. I bet all they’ll see is the black dot. No one sees the beautiful texture, immaculate whiteness, or shape of the paper. All they see is the black dot. Everything else is invisible. That’s how thankless developing a product can be. Nobody notices anything until something goes wrong. Then all hell breaks loose.

Every day, CEOs, project managers, product managers, brand managers, UX designers, developers, and digital marketers work hard developing new products and improving on existing ones. What users see are the shiny Web sites and colorful apps. But a lot happens behind the scenes, and the process is not as sleek as the outcomes.

But people often appreciate the results better when they know how much work went into achieving them. In this article, I’ll walk through the product-development process so you can better understand what makes it easy or complex. Read More

“It is widely accepted that creative design is not a matter of first fixing the problem and then searching for a satisfactory solution concept; instead it seems more to be a matter of developing and refining together both the formulation of the problem and ideas for its solution, with constant iteration of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation processes between the two “spaces”—problem and solution.”—Nigel Cross and Kees Dorst, in “Co-evolution of Problem and Solution Spaces in Creative Design,” 1999.

If my work in UX design holds any truth, it is that everything could change. On every project, we search for two qualities in parallel: a deeper understanding of the problem at hand and better solutions for it. Constant changes in both the problem and solution spaces are the fundamental forces underlying the UX design process. Read More