My Unglamorous Design Process

My design process for UX and interface design used to be fairly sophisticated, like something you'd read in a UX textbook:

  1. User research
  2. Paper sketches
  3. Wireframes
  4. UX designs
  5. Visual design and UI polish
  6. Animation, maybe

Now, it's more like this:

  1. FigJam
  2. Design
  3. Prototype

Let me explain.

FigJam

The first step is fast: maybe 1-2 hrs max. I work really hard to avoid getting stuck here.

The mental model here is "breadboarding" from Basecamp's book Shape Up. FigJam is the perfect tool for this step. I jot down all the affordances that need to be present on the page, organize them by priority, and list out the primary calls to action with links between screens.

This step acts as a conversation starter. It helps me point the ship in the right direction. I can burn through bad ideas early, and quickly. I can use this artifact to host informal, generative design jams with colleagues and stakeholders.

Design

Breadboarding in FigJam lets me skip wireframes entirely. Wireframes become redundant—neither low-fidelity enough to work rapidly nor high-fidelity enough to have meaningful conversations.

I can jump right from FigJam into design. I don't get hung up on whether I'm doing UX or UI design. I just work through all of that at once.

Of course, I'll sweat the details a lot more as a project winds down, but that  polish happens organically, typically when development begins (or sometimes after development begins).

This step doesn't have sub-steps. It's more like a gradient, or a subtle evolution, graduating to a polished product interface.

Prototype

Prototyping is a tap away in the Figma sidebar, so I try to use it as early as possible.

Even just single clicks from artboard to artboard gives me a presentable artifact and something I can pull up in Figma Mirror to get the work on a real device.

Now the work feels real, and I typically catch all sorts of problems that I'd miss looking at static screens.

The secret sauce

And here's the secret that glues the steps together: stakeholders see work at every step. We can have conversations all the way back at Step 1, so we get aligned on direction before we touch design.

This simple process lets me produce high quality work, quickly and consistently.

What do you think?

Where does your own design process differ from mine? Join the conversation and let me know on Twitter!