Full-stack design process

Design is all about users and their dimension and senses. It is important to understand all the 3 dimensions and 5 senses of the user while creating that awesome design for your website or mobile application.

Design and the senses:

Design is visual and for most of us design certainly is a visual element. But the process of designing encompasses more than just the visuals. We never design for a platform we design for people and while designing for people we need to have a thorough understanding of what they see, what they hear, what they smell, what they taste and what they touch. Digital design exists in the spatial world, therefore it is very important as a UI/UX designer to understand X, Y and Z of the spatial world to design awesome product experiences.

Flow – The UI/UX Design process at BiCSoM

At BiCSoM we understand what it takes to design an awesome digital experience, whether it is designing awesome mobile applications on Android and iOS; Designing awesome websites as single page applications or multi-page websites with adaptive or responsive approach; Designing 3d based Virtual reality and Augmented reality applications or designing voice based solutions for Amazon Alexa or Google Home. It all starts with the user first and we do this with our structured approach of awesomeness called ‘Flow’.

Flow is our full-stack design process. It starts with the users and ends with the users. Flow is a combination of UX and UI spread over 5 phases, each covering a specific time duration and milestone based on the type of product and its requirements.

Phase 1

We start ‘Flow’ with our phase 1 which is the research and understanding phase. In this phase we essentially do 3 keys tasks, which are:

  1. Stakeholder discussion – activities in this task includes:
    1. Lego modeling
    2. Business Model canvas &
    3. Stakeholder interview
  2. Product research – in this task we do the comparative study of 3 benchmark products and share a competitive study report
  3. User research –  in this task based on the stakeholder discussion we identify and create a user research group with a sample size of 10 and do the user interviews with the NPS system.

Phase 2

Based on the task completions and reports of phase 1, phase 2 starts with following key activities:

  1. Creation of final user persona and empathy map based on the user research of phase 1
  2. Card sorting for prioritizing the features
  3. Development of the user flows – which acts as the structured approach to Information architecture

Phase 3

The user flow from phase 2 helps us start working on the high fidelity wireframes. These are black and white representations of the screens that would appear as part of the application or website. By the end of this phase we deliver the black and white wireframes as tappable prototypes and get feedback from the stakeholders.

Phase 4

By the end of phase 3 our user’s  problem would have been clearly identified and with high fidelity wireframe our approach on solution would have started taking shape. Phase 4 is the key phase for the solution to our identified and understood design problem . The key activities in phase 4 would cover:

  1. Creation of 2 versions of Mood board
  2. 3 key screens design based on the approved Mood board typically the home screen, Auth screens and Splash
  3. Iteration and testing with stakeholders and identified user persona

Phase 5

With the visuals aligned and agreed and feedback received from the stakeholders and target user group it’s now time to roll out the final consumables design which can be used in the development. This is an iterative phase with design and iterate approach to get that awesome experience. The key activities of this phase are:

  1.  Creation of final screens, iterations with stakeholder and identified user persona
  2.  Fast iterative cycle of 2 weeks each
  3.  Roughly 55 to 60 screens as the final deliverable

Flow, helps us solve our customer’s design problems in a structured way. While Flow is a full-fledged UI/UX process. Based on our experience, every design challenge is unique. In some cases we need full process implementation and in some cases only a few phases of Flow. Based on the design problem and design maturity of the team that we work with, we can adapt our process to suit your UI/UX requirements. We would love to connect with you and understand more about your design challenges. Would you like to schedule your free UI/UX consultation? 

We believe an awesome design is the outcome of design thinking, being lean and doing agile while keeping the user at the center of the entire design process.

Rakhi Gupta – Co-Founder, BiCSoM