 What's up guys, in this episode we're going to take a look at the user-centered design process, so this is a personal opinion, I'm going to talk about what I think it is, you know what, everyone's going to have a different idea of what this is. Let me know in the comments what you think, there's no industry standard, but for me every business at its core solves a problem. That's why people come to you for business because you offer the best solution that they're looking for and as a designer that's your job to understand, you need to understand what the company is that you're working for, the client that's approached you, what problem they're solving and you'll only ever really know that by talking to the users. Yes, the company might think that they're solving this problem, but you know what, people use things for a lot of different things that are intended most of the time and that's why you'll be like, oh look at this new startup, it's done a pivot and all that means is that they've completely changed the direction of business based on the way people are using the product. So, let's take a look at the four stages of the user-centered design process, which is research, concept, design and test. We're going to talk about each one of these in a little detail, but the whole point of this is it's an iterative circle, it's infinite, it goes on forever or as long as you're in business and that's really, really important to you. A lot of businesses don't iterate, they don't continue this flow, but if you want to be the best like Amazon, they go through this all the time, that's why the website's not the most pretty looking because at the end of the day to them, making money doesn't matter. It's all about this process and you only find out a lot of stuff about your business by going through this process. So, the first stage, I need to mention, there's a lot more jobs on the market now for researchers, so I'm a designer, so I came into UX from visual design, from magazine design, but a lot of people come to it from science or HCI, which is human computer interaction. So, if you're into that stuff, you might want to be a researcher, I think it's a cool job, a lot of the big companies have great in-house testing, so where I've worked before they've had big rooms where you can meet customers, you can talk. It's good if you're a personal person and you like to meet and talk to people, I think it's a great career to go into and there's going to be a lot more jobs coming up. So, in the research phase, again, your job is to understand the problem you're trying to solve for your customer and you do that by talking to people. There's lots of different techniques you can use. You can use surveys if your customers are around the world. You can do one-on-one talking in real life questionnaires. You can do so many things. You can do personas. Again, based on survey results, if there's not real people there, create fictional people, put them on the posters on the walls, get your whole team involved, understand the customers, ask them questions about how the company solves problems for them, what it's all about, and in this research phase, a lot of ideas and a lot of solutions will just naturally come from this. So, we're not asking you to be a genius. I'm not a genius, certainly not, but a lot of my ideas come from just digging into research and some of the most obvious things come from there that the company will never think about because they're not deeply involved in this. So, research, research, research, and a lot of ideas will spring from this. That moves us then on to the concept phase and in this phase, this is where all your ideas from the research phase come into play. And you know what? Let's take design out of this. So, you don't get marked on your font choice on how good a design you are. You don't get marked on your interactions because at the end of the day, for a lot of these companies, that stuff is just icing on top. And really, concept phase should be about getting these ideas out in public, sketching a lot. I do a lot of crappy work with pen and pencil. And this is where wireframes come in. And the whole point in wireframes, in case you're wondering, you look at them and you think, oh, that looks terrible. That person doesn't know how to design. And you know what? They might not. But the whole point in wireframes is you take the conversation about design out of the equation. People love to talk about, you know what? I've shown people designs for a concept which I think is amazing before and spent days on, and they'll go, that's spelt wrong. And there's nothing more disheartening as a designer to hear stuff like that. Or, I don't like that font. I don't like that colour. So you know what? In your wireframes, make sure it's all spelt properly. Do as least design as possible. And people don't like complex conversations. So your whole point is to make this conversation very, very simple. And because you're demonstrating sometimes a complex idea or a complex flow of a website that you've designed or an app that you've designed, make it as simple as possible because then people won't go, oh, like people might say, I don't like that button. And they'll completely ignore 99% of what you've done. So your job is to strip it back. Talk to the people who you need to talk about about your concept to get it signed off. Show it as simply as possible. Papers fine, wireframes are fine, black and white design, whatever you want. Your job's not a designer. Your job is to get that concept out to just rough through it a few times, do a few simple tests. And then you pass it on into design phase. And this is where all the art happens. So you'll work with a UI designer. It might be someone like me. They might be a screen designer. They'll work with a normal level graphic design background. They'll work with the design style for the company, which a lot of big companies have a UI language. And that is a place where they, like a website where they install all their internal graphics. If you're designing like an app for Android or iPhone, the UI designer will know all the icons that they need to use, all the rules around the design, good design rules, aesthetic like white space and typography. They're the person for all of this. As a UX designer, your job is to bring it to this stage. And a lot of companies combine UX and UI into a new role, which is called product design. So you know what? You might be in charge of both. But your design hat shouldn't come on until this design stage. Once the concept's finalised, once you know what you're designing for, then you put your design in together. And then once that's done, you can package it and work with some corner design, but this is also development as well. So you work with developers. So you'll make this thing real. And then before you release it, you'll test it. So you can test it just with a simple prototype or you can test a simple development. It works in different places. I suggest testing as early as possible, so you don't waste money on development. But test it, get people in. This is where the researchers come in. Test it online with surveys. Test it with as many people as quick as you like. And you know what? Sometimes we used to get testers in. And I used to sit in and reiterate designs as we were going. We'd sit in and we'd see five testers in the morning. And they'd all say the same thing. They'd ignore 90% of it and be like, that button's too small. Or they don't know where to click, so you've got to introduce a new button in there. Or they won't like an image. These things will stand out to you and that's where the best improvements come from. The things that affect the most people and normally the simplest to do. So that will come from testing. And then, you know, when this is all done and you've iterated like this, so you've done your research, you've concept it, you've got into your design, you've tested it, then you release. And then this is where most companies stop. And that's like a critical error, which most people do. Because, you know, you've done 90% of the hard work. The other 10% to make this amazing, gives you the most results, by the way. A lot of people don't do because they just like to get it out the door. They like to shove it on and work on something else. But you need to look at your analytics. So most websites or digital products will have analytics built in. This is where UX researchers come in. Or anyone who's just interested in this stuff, a product owner, might be interested in doing it. But look at your analytics. See how people are actually using your thing. This is the only way you know how people use what you've produced. And you know what? You might see people go to, people all take the same journey. And you know what? You might change your homepage to make it the fourth page in the journey, instead of the first page, to save all those drop-offs and save those people. But there are simple things you can do at this stage that will improve it dramatically for everyone. That's where you need to look at your analytics. And then that can go back into concept design, test, and so on and so forth. But there are a lot of quick wins you can get from looking at analytics and do you know what? It's going to be money well spent by taking a look at that.