Aishley K.

User personas are a commonly used tool in UX design. Personas help us in creating products with a specific, not generic, user in mind.

Empathy interviews are the cornerstone of Design Thinking. By entering and understanding another person’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations, we can understand the choices that person makes, we can understand their behavioral traits, and we are able identify their needs.

Stakeholder interviews are a great place to start since they help us figure out business goals, technical constraints, usability problems, and more when approaching a project.

This exercise aims to take the project brief and turn them into tangible requirements that the product must have.

This exercise maps a customer's journey as they complete a task. They are great for tracking the customer's motives and gaining empathy for their emotions during the journey.

Competitor analysis helps me identify and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of our product or service in relation to the current market. Conducting a competitor analysis in the early stages helps us create better design decisions that help us focus on the strengths of our product.

Use Case is a documentation highlighting the possible interactions between the users and the system. They are great for gaining a perspective on what the key flows are within your product. They allow you to gain perspectives on how different users gain value from your product.

Mood boards are physical or digital collages that arrange images, materials, text, and other design elements into a format that's representative of the final design's style.

A storyboard in UX is a tool that visually predicts and explores a user's experience with a product. These are great for capturing the user's experience in a realistic manner and allow me to get creative when I am visualizing the user's journey. I tend to use these just before moving onto wireframing.

Brainstorming is a method designers use to generate ideas to solve clearly defined design problems. Brainstorming sessions work great with some of the other methods, such as HMW's

A wireframe is a two-dimensional skeletal outline of a webpage or app. Wireframes provide a clear overview of the page structure, layout, information architecture, user flow, functionality, and intended behaviors.

User flows help designers understand and anticipate our users' cognitive patterns to create products that enable the 'flow state' for those interacting with the product. They also help align the internal team of designers and developers by creating a consensus around the flow of the app.

Rapid prototyping is the process of iteratively mocking up an interface and validating it with users and stakeholders.

No-code minimum viable products help the product team to test some of the user experience and value proposition of the product at the early stage without spending too many resources. Also very useful when coupled with A/B testing.

A design system is a complete set of standards intended to manage design at scale using reusable components and patterns.

A usability-testing session asks a participant to perform tasks. While completing each task, the researcher observes the participant’s behavior and listens for feedback.

An A/B test is used to determine which version or variant of something will perform more effectively in the market.

First Click Testing examines what a test participant would click on first on the interface in order to complete their intended task.

A product roadmap is a tool for communicating our product vision and putting product plans in action.