In the design process, UX deliverables play a significant role. These design aids facilitate communication and help transform ideas into concrete designs for development and use by different stakeholders.
As much as wireframes, personas, user journey maps, prototypes, and usability testing reports are different UX deliverables, their functionality is similar in that they provide them. The project is more likely to remain focused on user-centered design.
Because of the structured and directed nature of these deliverables, design concepts are more straightforward to translate into implementable solutions and assist in communication between team members – all of which eliminates the end product failing to function or provide a favorable user experience for to users.
Source: Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
What Is UX?
User Experience (UX) refers to a person's overall experience when interacting with a product, service, mobile apps, or system. It's about how easy, intuitive, and satisfying that interaction feels.
UX design focuses on creating solutions that prioritize the user's needs, ensuring mobile apps and products are functional and enjoyable to use.
At its core, UX is about understanding users—what they want, how they think, and the challenges they face. This involves researching user behavior, testing designs, and continuously refining the product to improve usability and accessibility. More over, UX design is something agencies can help you with.
In our collaboration with Lulo Bank, we emphasized the importance of a well-designed UX to increase customer loyalty. By creating an intuitive platform that allows users to feel comfortable and confident when navigating the interface, we helped Lulo Bank increase customer satisfaction and encourage repeat usage.
Good UX design increases customer loyalty and reduces the costs associated with customer service and training, which ultimately contributes to the business’s success.
Lulo Bank Design by Clay
Understanding the Phases of the UX Design Process
The UX design process consists of certain stages and steps designers take to achieve a practical and desirable digital product.
This activity starts with research, which usually involves understanding a specific audience's behavior, needs, and pain points. These form the basis of the entire design process.
After this, designers define user personas, where they develop representations of target users, making the design work for the actual target users.
Designers develop novel solutions to address the user problems in the ideation step. This step often includes collaborating with other team members to create rough sketches or wireframes.
These concepts are then built into interactive models or mockups in the next step – prototyping, which allows for visualization of the final product and them to be functionally tested.
The last stage of this process is testing, where the final design is shared with other users, and their feedback is applied to improve the design. These steps are essential to ensure the end product is effective and enjoyable while achieving other business objectives.
Source: behance
User Research Deliverables
User Personas
Nuanced summaries of envisaged users that are more specific than the target audience and include demographics, objectives, obstacles, motives, and behavior patterns.
These personas are built due to rigorous analysis and data collection, enabling teams to appreciate and understand the users they are designing for.
By portraying the target audience in human form, user personas make specific designs relevant to the user's real-life issues instead of fabricated ones.
User Journey Maps
Detailed visuals that map how users interact with a given product or service for the first time and the last. These maps identify the respective touchpoints while describing the pain, frustration, and delight and the components of the user's journey that can be improved upon or innovated throughout.
Empathy Maps
Team-based specific tools that give further information as to what the users feel, think, say, and do while in different situations.
Since empathy maps depict emotional response and perspective, they assist teams in determining and addressing unknown needs with suitable and better designs.
They enable a smoother transition from data to insights, bringing the users closer to the designers.
Source: medium
Research Reports
In-depth reviews of the results of interviews, surveys statistical analysis, and usability testing report, assessments competitive analysis, and others.
This analysis lays out the most of research findings, important patterns, trends, and data-informed insights in a way that makes it useful for decision-making. Reports are designed to address the issues with products in the market with solid evidence or detailed, research findings. This helps create products that users perfect and appreciate.
Information Architecture Deliverables
Site Maps
Tag maps are comprehensive maps depicting a website's entire structure and hierarchy. They help sort pages by explaining interconnectivity between the different sections, allowing designers and users to quickly comprehend the website's layout. With ergonomics, browsing site maps becomes effortless, and users can quickly locate any information they seek.
User Flows
User flows are step-by-step action maps that outline every procedure a user undertakes to achieve a task or set goal on a website or application.
These maps also outline key decisions to be made, actions to be carried out, and possible routes to take, which aid the designer in pinpointing and fixing potential problems or incomplete designs.
Modifying processes suggested by user flows can achieve an improved and more enjoyable user experience.
Content Inventories
Content inventories are detailed catalogs of all materials in a site that comprise text the user interacts with, different forms of imagery, videos, and any other downloadable media assets.
Content inventories are necessary for an organized website to highlight old and unnecessary content that must be removed and identify areas where additional content can be added.
This practice ensures that the site's content is up to date and meets the user's expectations as well as the objectives of the business.
Card Sorting Results
Card sorting is a form of user research where participants group concepts into categories in a manner meaningful to them.
Source: justinmind
The outcomes give an understanding of people's attitudes towards information and its categorization. By assessing the results of the studies conducted, teams will be able to develop more rational and intuitive approaches to site navigation, making content more accessible and aligned with user needs.
Interaction Design Deliverables
Wireframes
More simplified, low-fidelity graphical representations of a website in which the location of the content, features, and functionality is planned.
They are to the designers what a construction blueprint is to a building project, focusing attention on structural issues of the design before the finer details are done.
Interactive Prototypes
Designs that are high-fidelity representations of the website. These are clickable and interactive prototypes whose elements are used to demonstrate how the website will work in its final form.
These prototypes are crucial for testing, obtaining user feedback, and enhancing the user interface, before coding happens.
Source: Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash
Component Libraries
Organized collections of reusable UI elements, such as buttons, forms, icons, and navigation components, that come with clear and detailed documentation on implementing and customizing them.
These collections are often part of a more extensive design system and serve as a common language between designers and developers, ensuring consistency across projects.
By standardizing the appearance and functionality of UI elements, they save significant time and effort during the design and development process while improving the overall user experience.
Interaction Specifications
Detailed and comprehensive guidelines outline how design elements should behave across various scenarios, such as hover states, click actions, animations, or transitions.
These specifications ensure that interactive components respond intuitively to user inputs, creating a smooth and engaging user experience.
By providing clear instructions on timing, motion, and responsiveness, interaction specifications help developers precisely replicate the intended design vision, maintaining consistency and usability throughout the final product.
Source: KOBU Agency on Unsplash
Visual Design Deliverables
Style Guides
A style guide is a crucial document that stipulates and depicts how the product should look in terms of colors, fonts, spacing, and distinctive branding visuals like logos and icons.
Style guides allow for uniformity in the design of a particular object and serve as a guide for the designers, developers, and marketers for the sensitive details in the product to keep the brand looking professional.
Such guides are indispensable for projects that involve many people to minimize the chances of visual discrepancies in the final product.
UI Kit
UI kits are a functional set of premade, assorted, re-usable interface elements including, but not limited to, buttons, sliders, menus, input boxes, navigation bars, and checkboxes.
UI kits save time and resources during the design process by making it easier for designers to assemble interfaces quickly without making each part from scratch.
Additionally, kits assist in minimizing mistakes while promoting efficiency as designers and developers utilize the same vetted elements. Comprehensive UI kits will set rules around usage behavior, states (hover, active), and even responsive design.
Source: behance
High-fidelity Mockups
To incorporate detailed designs and user testing feedback in the later stages of a project, which can save time and resources, design processes could be improved to solve these concerns. The high-fidelity mock-ups or Design System Mock-ups are ideal for portraying the intended design.
It is a design mock-up prepared during the transition from baseline wireframes to a UI style guide. It is not just a depiction but interacts with real users, to show usability report collect feedback, making the process helpful. It is accurate enough for a functional Design For Testing (DFT) mock-up.
Design Systems
Modern organizations have teams to create and manage style guides and documentation in this agile world. Sometimes, teams even have separate ones for each project.
A design manual documents everything into a single document. A design manual merges different documents in one process and then unifies design patterns, branding, accessibility, development, and writing in one coherent document.
This approach makes it easier for all team members to adhere to the brand's philosophy, regardless of their skills and/or roles.
Documentation and Handoff Deliverables
Design Specifications
These documents communicate the specific visual components that must be delivered. They ensure that the development team understands how the design ought to be executed aesthetically and functionally, as well as User Interaction details like layouts, typography, colors, and more, taking in all possible user interactions.
Source: Jason Goodman on Unsplash
These documents serve as the primary point of reference for the combination of design and development, which helps mitigate any risks incurred from poor communication and guarantees alignment of the end product with the intended vision.
Redline Documents
These documents are thorough and higher-level, detailing the spacing, padding, key measurements, and everything else essential for the precision implementation of the design.
They help the developers understand the specific placement, dimensions, and other important design details. Redline documents are more useful in projects where design accuracy and consistency are a primary concern.
Asset Libraries
These collections contain a variety of ready-made designs available for immediate use, like guides, icons, images, graphics, and other design components. They can be utilized throughout the project as they are stored in a manner that promotes easy accessibility.
The asset libraries promote efficiency within the project because they save time. After all, the design can be implemented quickly and cohesively without regard to the number of people working on the project.
Animation Specifications
These documents elaborate on how animations and transitions should be implemented. They include instructions for motion patterns, timing, ease of curves, and trigger points.
Source: UX Indonesia on Unsplash
These details ensure that the the user interface's interactions are seamless, captivating, and integrate well with the design. The animation specifications help render the design, therefore improving the user experience.
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Conclusion
In summary, picking the right deliverables is very important for the success of your project because those are the essential tools for communication, collaboration, and alignment for all stakeholders.
Adapting these deliverables to your team's needs and the project's scope enables better communication, workflow, and outcomes. As in other fields, good design deliverables such as wireframes, user personas, prototypes, and usability reports help translate concepts into reality with a shared understanding of all stakeholders.
There will always be changes and developments in the field of UX design, and timely adoption competitive analysis of these changes will help solve complex design problems, especially with the growing need for new trends and tools in deliverables.
Measuring step and bound, a carefully considered approach to deliverables, increases your chances of more effective user-centric design solutions and project success in the long run.
About Clay
Clay is a UI/UX design & branding agency in San Francisco. We team up with startups and leading brands to create transformative digital experience. Clients: Facebook, Slack, Google, Amazon, Credit Karma, Zenefits, etc.
Learn moreAbout Clay
Clay is a UI/UX design & branding agency in San Francisco. We team up with startups and leading brands to create transformative digital experience. Clients: Facebook, Slack, Google, Amazon, Credit Karma, Zenefits, etc.
Learn more
