1. Understand
Understand the core goal. What is the business objective and the opportunity? What are the key metrics we need to shift? What value are we bringing our users? Understanding these questions are essential in order to communicate with the stakeholders and deliver a successful project.
2. Design Research
Research is important in building the right solution. User research helps us understand users' pain points and how they might use the product. It's easy to start off with a solution in mind. Research helps us to verify or eliminate any assumptions we've had.
3. Define Direction
Use the gathered research to define a direction of the solution. We can do this by defining our users, and their work flow, and what our value proposition is. It helps designers design with focus rather than assumptions, and allows us to prioritise the most important things.
4. Prototype
Prototyping is useful to test potential solutions before production. Gather user feedback to validate these solutions. It will save us from wasting time and money on development.
5. Design and Build
The validated idea is polished and built into production. This is where attention to detail can make a huge difference. How the UI is designed, animates, moves, can leave a lasting impression to the user's experience.
6. Launch
Launch requires more thought than one may think. It requires planning to make sure a high quality product is shipped. We may consider dog feeding (internal testing), soft launch, or beta launch.
7. Analyze
Measuring and analysing the performance is key to a successful product. Set in place metrics to measure, monitor and gather feedback from users to learn and iterate. This is how you become a long loved product.
8. Learn
Gain a retrospective on what went right and what we can improve in the process. And also make sure to celebrate the hard work!
