Product Manager, Creatie · 10 min read · Nov 13, 2024
Design may be a creative practice, but that doesn’t mean it should lack structure. In fact, the most effective designers are those who have a solid process to follow. This allows them not only to come up with great ideas but to execute them effectively, ensuring their designs are user-centered and solve real problems.
A well-defined design process provides designers with a roadmap for transforming initial concepts into polished, functional solutions.
In this guide, we’ll explore the seven steps involved in the design process, discuss why it's important to have a process in the first place, and dig into some of the common challenges designers face.
What is the design process?
The design process is a structured, step-by-step approach to a product, app, or interface that designers follow to solve user problems and create solutions. It involves everything from initial research and ideation to prototyping, user testing, and hand-off to developers.
A good design process is a repeatable framework that guides designers from initially identifying a problem to delivering a user-centered solution.
The importance of a clear design process
Why do you need a design process? Why can’t you just employ your UX design tool and get to it?
Technically, you can, but having a structured process to follow provides designers with a number of benefits. These include:
Consistency: A good process ensures a logical and repeatable approach to creativity and problem-solving.
Collaboration: Structuring the design process provides a common language for design teams to work together more effectively.
Efficiency: Using a design process saves time by avoiding the trial-and-error that comes with unstructured design approaches.
User focus: A good design process keeps the end-user at the center of each step, helping designers keep this focus top of mind. It ultimately leads to more appropriate and user-friendly outcomes.
Innovation: Design processes encourage creative exploration while grounding ideas in real-world practicality and feasibility.
In fact, a solid design process is so crucial that McKinsey found that businesses with strong design processes experienced 32% higher revenue growth and 56% higher returns than their peers.
Who uses the design process?
Of the professionals who might use a design process, most fall into the following categories:
Web developers use design processes to stay focused on the user journey to build user-friendly, functional websites.
Graphic designers follow design processes to create visual content that communicates messages clearly and is consistent across multiple assets.
Product designers use design processes to develop both physical and digital products.
UX/UI designers follow design processes to enhance user experience and interfaces for websites, apps, and software platforms.
Architects use design processes to create functional, sustainable, aesthetic buildings and spaces.
Industrial designers follow design processes when creating consumer products such as electronics or furniture.
3 classic design processes
Before we dive into the seven-step design process, here’s a quick note: there is no one process that all designers follow. Most designers develop their own individual processes through experience, creating a playbook that suits their needs, tools, and, of course, what they’re designing.
There are, however, a few classic design processes:
This is a user-centered approach that encourages problem-solving through iteration and empathy. It consists of five key stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
Human-centered design (HCD) is similar to Design Thinking but also has a strong emphasis on user empathy and continuous user feedback. The three core phases of HCD are inspiration, ideation, and implementation.
The design process in 7 steps
In the seven-step design process we’re about to discuss, we’ve incorporated elements of the above classic design processes and others, combining them with modern best practices to deliver a robust and broadly applicable workflow.
Let’s get started.
1. Strategizing and setting scope and goals
The first stage is to take a step back from the design and get strategic.
You’ll define the project scope, set objectives, and define the deliverables. You’ll also set some timelines, create a project roadmap, and align with stakeholders.
This phase is critical for ensuring buy-in across all team members and stakeholders, keeping the team focused on core objectives and minimizing scope creep.
2. Research and discovery
Once you’ve set some goals and developed the project scope, you can dive into the user research and discovery phase.
This involves conducting user interviews to get a better picture of the problem you’re looking to solve; digging into a competitive analysis to understand who is solving the problem currently and how; and developing user personas to map pain points and opportunities.
Investing time in this research phase ensures that the design decisions you make are user-centered and data-driven rather than just a best guess. This reduces the risk of designing ineffective or irrelevant solutions.
3. Ideation and concept development
Now you can start looking at the actual solution.
This phase is about coming up with multiple ideas and solutions. It involves holding brainstorming sessions, sketching out concepts, and drawing on community resources and templates to explore further.
The idea here is to explore various approaches at the most basic level before committing to a single solution. This helps you avoid wasted resources and ensure that you proceed with the best idea.
4. Design, prototyping, and wireframing
Once you’ve determined which idea (or set of ideas) you’re going to proceed with, you can move on to the prototyping and wireframing stage. This involves translating those ideas into tangible visual assets such as wireframes, mockups, and prototypes.
You might, for instance, create a high-fidelity interactive prototype to visualize user flows and interaction and enable some user testing.
Like the previous stage, this step is all about early validation of design concepts to save time and money before proceeding with official development.
5. Testing and refinement
The fifth stage of our design process is user testing and feedback gathering.
You’ll conduct usability tests, A/B test different design options to pit concepts against each other, and gather user feedback to identify design flaws and discover areas for improvement.
This early testing stage is critical for ensuring that the end product is intuitive, effective, and user-friendly. It helps you maintain a user-centric approach and provides an opportunity to integrate user feedback and usability data.
6. Handoff and launch
Next, you’re going to integrate the user feedback you’ve captured into the final product as you transition from design to development.
This is where you hand off the final version to developers for implementation. Then, you’ll launch the product to the public.
It’s not over yet, though. The final step is to perform a post-launch analysis to review how real users interact with the end product. You can then use this data, alongside any additional feedback you’ve captured, to continuously iterate and improve the product.
This is important for ensuring that your product remains relevant and competitive, which enhances its long-term success.
Common challenges in the design process
The design process is not without its limitations. Most of these come in the form of common challenges that can be resolved. Having a good idea of what they are is a good first step to avoiding them.
Stakeholder misalignment: This can lead to a lot of conflicting feedback, slow down progress, and result in an unfocused and unhelpful design.
Misunderstood target audience: Failure to engage in adequate research and discovery can mean that you have a poorly formed or incorrect picture of your target audience. As a result, you design something that doesn’t solve a real user need.
Iteration overload: It's not uncommon to get stuck in an iteration loop near the end of the process. This happens if there’s misalignment, a lack of deep understanding of the problem you’re solving, or a diverse target audience with different needs that pull the product in different directions.
Time and budget constraints: Having a short timeline to launch or a low budget for design can restrict your ability to dig into adequate user research and testing, ultimately leading to an inferior result.
Design and dev team misalignment: Poor alignment between the design and development teams can hurt the handoff process and may lead to a final product that doesn’t reflect what the design team originally created.
The design process for physical vs digital products
Designers of both physical and digital products use a formalized process, like the one we discussed above, to come up with new designs.
Naturally, however, there are a few key differences between the two undertakings:
Material considerations: Digital product designers focus on virtual elements such as coding languages, file formats, and user interface constraints. Physical product designers, on the other hand, need to think about the properties of the materials they use such as weight, durability, and how these may impact production, user interaction, and cost.
Prototyping: The prototyping stage tends to be more rapid and cost-effective for digital products due to the use of specialized software platforms. Prototyping a physical product can require specialized machinery and equipment, however, which can be costly and time-consuming.
User testing: Usability testing for digital products often occurs in a controlled setting and can even be remote. It uses software tools to track user behavior and feedback. Testing physical products requires in-person, hands-on evaluations and monitoring.
Overlap between physical and digital design
While there are some key differences between the design process for digital and physical products, there are also a number of similarities. These include:
User-centered design: The best products, whether physical or digital, prioritize users’ needs, experience, and problems.
Design thinking: Both processes often use methodologies that emphasize empathy, ideation, prototyping, and testing to refine concepts and keep the end user front and center.
Aesthetic considerations: Both physical and digital product designs must consist of visual aesthetics, branding, and product styling, which can impact both usability and opinions on the product.
Functionality and usability: The goal of all designers, whether they’re working on a physical product or a digital one, is to design a functional product that is useful for the end user and solves an identified problem.
Feedback loops: Continuous feedback is essential in both design processes. Whether this involves in-person user testing and focus groups for physical products or product analytics for a digital tool, understanding user interactions and integrating feedback is critical for improving the final output.
Integrating AI into your design process
Whether you’re designing an app, software interface, or physical product, a well-developed and defined design process is critical to minimize wasted resources and ensure that you prioritize the user in your end product.
Today’s AI tools help UX designers execute this process in a number of powerful ways, from supporting wireframe ideation to iterating on prototypes to incorporate user feedback.
Creatie, our AI-powered design tool, is the perfect partner for designers looking to streamline their processes and break creative boundaries.
With powerful features like AI image enhancement, style guide compliance checks, and wireframe generation, you’ll speed through workflows and iterate faster on new designs.
Our website requires the use of essential cookies for proper operation. These cookies are vital for certain functions, for example, determining the login status of your account. Essential cookies rarely collect and use any personal data, though they may assign a unique ID code to distinguish you from other users, for session maintenance and to service facilitation. Disabling cookies may impair website functionality. If you have any complaint or query about our use of cookies, please contact us at support@creatie.ai.
