There’s a new fixation in the digital world that every design expert is earnestly and passionately chasing – the user experience, or you can say the UX deliverables. Every agency wants to decipher the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of a customer’s mind – what a customer wants and how they feel.
In the current technology driven era, a seamless and friendly user experience or UX as it is more commonly known, is the Holy Grail that can make or break a business.
Here, we are heavily focusing on the mantra every UX designer counts on – the magnificent UX deliverables.
What are UX deliverables, and what is their basic function?
UX deliverable is a document/presentation that guides the design experts and UX developers to stay afloat with the technological nuances, user interaction objectives, content consumption patterns through interviews, personas etc. to fulfil business expectations.
UX deliverables combine ideas, structures, and research to communicate design ideas and provide solutions throughout the different phases of the design and product launch.
Why are designers relentlessly pursuing it?
UX deliverables are crafted to put in place a streamlined communication structure where designers can easily connect with the various stakeholders, the teams working on the project and keep them updated on the new developments or implementation changes.
- UX deliverables help you to deal with questions (from the client and the internal team) like:
- What deliverables can we expect at the end of the project?
- How smoothly can we add new features in the future?
- Will it be easy to maintain the designs you created?
- Will our developers be able to execute this design?
In this blog, we address all the above UX deliverables-related questions and situations with the help of a few UX deliverables that may help in maintaining an equilibrium in the project:
The following UX deliverables are the most common ones that the designers produce during the life span of a project.
Irrespective of the industry, platform, or the budget, UX deliverables can be further broadly divided into the following stages:
- Research phase
- UX design phase
- UI design phase
Let’s look at each one of these phases individually.
Research phase
This can be further divided into to 2 deliverables – User Research Takeaways and Research Document.
User Research Takeaways – It includes a plethora of user-based inputs like field studies, personal feedback, interviews, and online surveys. With these inputs, you obtain additional information about the customer’s persona/character like behavior, needs, emotions etc.
The results are combined into a document along with the source inputs like videos and audio findings, notes from the interviews etc. This practice majorly helps in roping in important stakeholders buy-ins.
UX Research Document – Here, you collate a list of the direct competitors (around 5-7 will do) and understand what works best for their business and what doesn’t. Also, closely monitor their approach to the issues you identified during the initial research stage and the mechanism they adopted to come out of the situation. Take note of the standard industry jargon and naming convention.
All the navigation and design pattern-related observations and findings may be stored at one common place to create a final document that can later work as a handbook to help the design decisions of the project.
UX Design Phase
The design phase includes:
- Wireframes
- User flow diagram
- Interactive prototype
Wireframes
Wireframes can be defined as the scaffolding of a website or an app. They help the design experts to define various layouts, clarify and strengthen the project requirements and the diverse UX workflows. Wireframes are simple and easy to maintain, hence giving us the opportunity to tap on the feedback from the end users and stakeholders.
There are two kinds of wireframes – low fidelity wireframes and high-fidelity wireframes. It is advisable to go for the low fidelity in the initial phase while working on the layout and navigation. On the other hand, even though high-fidelity wireframes require more time to create, they are considered better in the long run.
User flow diagram
As the name implies, user flow is a diagram (mostly a flowchart), used by the product team to understand how a user navigates and on your site.
The most common example we can quote here is of a user shopping on an e-commerce website – right from selecting the products and adding them to the cart to checking out from the website and successfully placing the order.
A user flow diagram offers a timeline of a customer’s journey and helps to ensure that all steps are in place and coordinate with the design team and make timely design improvements.
Interactive prototype
As they say, a picture speaks a thousand words, and this is precisely why an interactive prototype breathes life into a product. An interactive prototype is used in both, the wireframing and visual design processes.
It helps us to test a variety of things like:
- Validating assumptions made in the initial stage and seeing how things will work in real
- Spot the trouble spots (if any)
- User testing
Interactive prototype gives a chance to carry out customer testing session and showcase our work to the client and stakeholder and receive their valuable feedback. It gives a chance for the whole team to see how a site will function and behave and how a user will interact in a use-case scenario.
Personas
Persona, as the name depicts, is a functional character a designer crafts as a user prototype. It, invariably, represents a user, what they think, how they feel, how they interact, what they expect, how they perceive information, their interests, their goals, motivation etc.
Considering the cops of the projects, designers usually generate several personas to understand a wider audience’s behavioral pattern.
Personas help the designers to understand the characteristics of a person and empathize towards them.
UI Design Phase
This can be further divided into:
- Visual design mockups
- UI animations
- Design system
- Design specification
Visual design mockups
The work on visual design mockups begins when developers are almost done finalizing the core features of the wireframes and workflows. This deliverable helps us in masterfully visualizing the content for the future, including finer details like colors and typography.
UI animations
User interface animations are liking the icing on the cake that not just beautify the visual aspect of a product, but further refine a greater user experience. UI animation, through a variety of elements like short video clips, vivid colors, animation, and motion clips etc. holds the user’s attention and also helps them along the way. These delightful components help the main team, i.e. the developers, to add them to the final product.
Design system
Design step can be accounted as a fundamental step. For an agency, design system is like a standard handbook that includes a set of design-centric documents that help the internal design team of the client or third-party agencies. The design system can come in various forms like sketch libraries, style guide, pattern library etc. At the end of the day, a design system helps developers and designers with recommendations, execution and overall maintaining visual consistency throughout the development of the product.
Design specifications
Most often than not, the developers and designers find it excruciatingly painful to find required information all at one place. This leads to small discrepancies which later turn into a Herculean task. Design specifications form the core of a product and explain what it is and how you want it to function and basically reach the purpose of the product. It consists of an exhaustive list of design needs and solutions that need to be applied to the product.
Conclusion
The process of creating a hassle-free user experience is complex, dynamic, yet doable if one diligently set the various UX deliverables and refer to it as a handbook. Either ways, the more an agency follows the deliverables, the more they understand a user’s temperament, the happier the client or the end user will be.