Don’t Underestimate The Value of Even the Most Common UX Deliverables

A UX designer works in different environments — from agile environments and lean startups where teams contribute with little documentation to consulting engagements for third-parties, or large companies and government entities with strict documentation obligations.

Regardless of the nature of environment or engagement, UX professionals always have to communicate their research findings effectively, design ideas and the development of projects to reach a range of audiences.

While a UX designer begins the designing process, they might produce a wide variety of “artifacts” and project deliverables as an essential part of their UX design methodology.

(Sources of information include: uxplanet, cooper, usability.gov, cnbc, msnbc live)

Ten UX Deliverables that are found common yet effective

Deliverables, in general, help UX designers communicate with teams and stakeholders, document work, and bring artifacts for summits and ideation sittings. They also lead towards creating a “single source of truth,” which are guides and specifications for implementation and reference.

I, as a UX designer, consider ten UX deliverables that a UX designer typically generates during an engagement. This list, which I’m going to share with you, is by no means comprehensive or may seem longer depending on the nature of the engagement.

1) Business aims and technical specifications

For a UX designer, it all starts with an understanding of the product vision, i.e., the motive for the products’ existence from a business perspective. When written in simple words, the statement should consist of the problem being highlighted, the proposed solution, and a reasonable description of the target market. It should also refer to the delivery platforms and touch lightly upon the technical means by which the product will be supplied.

The statement of the product vision need not be longer than a page but should define the core of the What, Why and How.

2) Formation of competitive analysis report

While a UX professional beginning to design a fresh product, it’s important to consider it’s a good market fit. The product, as part of a UX strategy, must feature a convincing competitive plus and a UX that’s superior to others in the marketplace.

An assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors, or simply the competitive analysis, means: “Spotting competitors and evaluating their strategies to decide their strengths and weaknesses comparative to those of your own product or service.”

Designers, in fact, need to find, is there already any equivalent product or service out there in the target market? Is there any other solution people are using that’s useful enough but not perfect? A Band-Aid–a vitamin but not a painkiller? Finally, they need to make an idea about “how can better UX make a difference?”
A component of user experience research, a competitive analysis report is generally focused on the top five potential competitors and examines what it is they’re working right, as well as what they’re doing wrong. This way, the report helps provide a design direction where clear goals are described and the elements to be worked on spelled out.

A competitor analysis chart by Chandan Mishra

3) Creating personas and UX research reports

For a product to perform successfully, UX designers need to make sure stakeholders know the needs of the product’s customers.

While a UX professional embarking user research, they need to make sure they’ve given enough time to develop a research plan. It is a document that helps communicate research aims and methods as well as collect buy-in from stakeholders.

A research paper is a great way to keep everyone follow the track during the research project.
After a report translating the research findings into actionable items is generated at the end of the user research phase, the UX team is set to design the product around those items.

Personas

4) Sitemap and creation of information architecture

A sitemap, to its core, is a visual model containing all the components and information of a digital product. For instance, it carries the pictorial ordering of an App or site’s content.

Sitemaps, along with wireframes, work as one of the most fundamental of UX deliverables and hardly skipped in a UX design process. They contribute to laying out the information architecture that’s both an art and science of arranging and labeling a product’s components to support navigation, findability and usability.

A sitemap, containing information architecture

5) Experience maps, user journeys and user flows

An experience map, in its essence, is a visual representation of a user’s flow within a specific product or service. It covers all their goals, needs, thoughts, time spent, feelings, reactions, expectations, anxieties–i.e. the entire experience during their interaction with a product.
It usually establishes on a linear timeline showing touch-points between the product and the user.

User journeys and user flows are more linked with a likely series of steps a user takes. They demonstrate the way users interact currently–or could potentially interact with a product. They also very much describe behavior, functionality and the essential tasks a user might do.

By taking into account the “flow” of multiple tasks a user might perform, you can begin thinking about what sort of content and functionalities to consider in the user interface, and what type of UI the user will require to achieve them.

Much of the user experience design is about solving problems for users.

Therefore, when crafting a user journey, designers should keep in mind the persona, the user’s goals, current pain points, motivations and the key tasks they want to get from the product.

Developing a good understating of the difference between a user journey and user flow ensures that the design of the final product will be effective for the targeted customers. Think of a user flow as the user working on one goal or task via your product or service, e.g., booking a car on Uber; a user journey highlights the bigger picture. A user journey encompasses beyond just tasks and focuses on how a specific end-user interaction fits into a larger context.

An experience map: Worked out as part of a UX design process

6) UX Wireframes

A staple of UX design methodology, wireframes are basically a layout tool that helps define the information architecture, functionalities, the spacing of content, the interaction design and finally provide idea about intended user behaviors.
They’re two-dimensional “blueprint” containing illustrations of a design framework and interface essentials, and show what goes where!

Wireframes are in general bread-and-butter for UX designers and one of the most standard deliverables on a project. “Show me you wireframes” is probably heard more often than anything else during a UX designer’s job interview.

A major step in the UX design process, wireframes are great at quickly ideating beyond sketching. They come in a range of appealing flavors, i.e. from low-fidelity (no styling, greeked text, black and white boxes) to high-fidelity (very detailed, fully styled, color), they cover them all.

Wireframes are called “wires” in the workplace shorthand. They are called so because they’re so pliable and quick to produce and can help save a lot of time and money down the line. They serve as a centerpiece around which conversations take place with stakeholders and team members on figuring out the design direction.

Wireframes are foundational, and as such, are instrumental in guiding to define a design structurally. They work to answer “how a user flow carries out though an App or site under different use case scenarios?”

Annotated wireframes: Common UX design artifacts

7) Interactive prototypes

Another essential deliverable in user-centered design process, interactive prototypes breathe life into a product. They, for example, saves a lot of time and funds by demonstrating how things will perform in an actual case scenario. Moreover, they help a designer effectively communicate their design at different stages of the UX design process.

Prototyping, in its essence, can happen at any stage during the journey of discovery through iteration. An internal review of the product prototype allows everyone in the team to see what would be the output performance when an actual user interacts with the product.

Wireframes and static sketches usually don’t bring a product to life in a way that an interactive prototype can. Almost magically, it is observed and felt how the product will behave–how everything connects.

Diverse designs and features can be explored; new ideas may surface. Trouble spots can be detected, and awkward interactions disclosed.
Rather than walking people through static pages, interactive prototypes help potential users run a test to find a product that is 100% real. Also, it encourages them to contribute ideas and give feedback for a specific design.

Nowadays, prototyping tools for designers come in a range of sizes and shapes. Here are some interactive prototyping tools for a better UX design.

Interactive prototype for UX design

8) Visual design

Visual design is supposed to be the “final coat of paint” on the product. In fact, it’s not just that: visual design can significantly affect the user experience of a product, and therefore must be done very wisely.
Hopefully, most of the interaction design and usability heuristics were controlled out during prior phases of the UX design process so that the designer can focus on visuals. It is one last break to take the product to the next level.

Visual design is the last step where a styleguide and final specs are craft before handoff to developers. It’s not only about “making things beautiful,” but an opportunity to outline, or implement a brand color-scheme and affect usability with layout, visual hierarchy and contrast.

Visual design as the final UX design process step after sketches, wireframes, interaction design and prototypes

9) Putting together specifications and a styleguide for developers

Styleguides are a must if a product’s design is to thrive in the long run. Putting together the specifications to generate a styleguide for the developers is the final step in the UX design workflow.

A styleguide is, for sure, needed to guarantee that designs are implemented consequently across branding, visual styles, fonts, colors and typography. It’s also beneficial to achieve design patterns, rules (like keyboard shortcuts and data display rules), language, and specifying UI behaviors (such as error handling).

The automated ways are a more agile, incremental way to handoff designs vs. styleguides crafted over a considerable amount of time. They can be speculation of more like “bibles of style” on the shelf that everyone on the team can refer to.

If you do work in Sketch, there’re godsends like Zeplin that’s a unique collaboration tool for UI designers and front end developers. It prospers beyond the design workflow and helps teams with the design handoff.

What’s more advantageous about the design styleguide is that it can be generated quickly from Sketch with the Craft plug-in, or CSS and measurements taken from the design by engendering an HTML file with the Marketch plug-in as drawn here.
More than 50 styleguide examples are provided here for UX designers: One from MSNBC, and one from IBM, both of which features their guides online for everyone to view it easily.

Styleguide and specifications: The final step in the UX design process

10) Usability testing and automated analytics reports

You probably heard that a designer’s job is never done; same is the case with a UX designer: Even after a product is launched, there remain opportunities to take feedback, gather data on usage, refine, and release and start the cycle all over again.

A usability test can tell the UX designer whether or not their target customers will use their product. For instance, it helps recognize the problems users are experiencing with a specific UI and identifies difficult-to-achieve tasks and confusing language.

Usability testing reports are generally delivered in the course of the prototyping phase; however, it’s not weird to test current products with users to get where there may be room for improvement.
Understanding data assembled during usability testing–collecting, categorizing and the generation of reports, is becoming an increasingly common task among UX practitioners. In fact, it’s evolving as a crucial UX skill. Here you can take a view of a usability testing report template.

Once the product is offered in the market, another set of data collection — a quantitative technique–will tell the designers’ team how the products will go with users on a mass scale.

There’re different ways and techniques to assess user behavior and analyze it. From eye-tracking to click-tracking and heatmaps (which display clicks, taps, and scrolling behavior) to UI component tagging, which follows the digital footprint of every user across mobile and web devices.

Most of the analytics companies, these days, rely on automated reports, which are handy and can provide rich insights into a product’s usage. That surprising feature you might think would win over all customers may turn out to be hardly ever used. On the flip side, a little, insignificant function in the UI may prove to be attaining a lot of use, and you may decide it’s time to concentrate on expanding that particular functionality.

Usability testing reports

Final words:

The mission of a UX designer is to empower companies to create products and services based on an in-depth understanding of human behaviors, motivations, and goals. The 10 UX deliverables here are some of the most commonly produced by UX designers as they craft mesmerizing experiences for users as part of “design thinking” and a user-centered design process.


UX Planet

UX Planet is a one-stop resource for everything related to user experience.

Thanks to uxplanet.org

UX Planet

UX Planet is a one-stop resource for everything related to user experience.

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