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Introducing UX- Design Into Website Development Workflow

Norman Johnson

In this article, I will share how we, a branding and web development studio, have managed to significantly improve our website development process and how we managed to implement a new methodology in our project work. Ultimately, these innovations help us to show our client a truly impressive level of website work.

Understanding the problem

As we began to dive into the web development field in earnest, we realized that creating a beautiful design for a website was not enough. Project coordination was delayed, the designer, working alone, did not always interpret the TOR correctly and did not fully think through the logic or forgot to draw any window at all, something was constantly missing.

It became obvious that the problem lay in insufficient analytical work and lack of specialists on the project. We allocated little time for structuring data, building a prototype and testing hypotheses before drawing the design. After all, to create an impressive site you need to understand user requests and behavioral patterns very well, to study a lot of different data, to anticipate possible problems at other stages, and also to provide the site with unique content that will be easy to perceive from the screen. All this one designer can not do, no matter how much experience he does not have, and his main task is to draw beauty, not to design, although this he should have ideas.

Solving the problem

The turning point in solving the issue was the introduction of the prototyping stage into the project work, or, in other words, the application of UX-design principles. Before that, we made prototypes, but they were more of a design and there was no room for variants and experiments. Now a special person, or rather a UX-designer, became engaged in collecting and analyzing data, structuring the site and generating hypotheses. In addition, we closely connected the UX-designer with the developers and the entire creative team of the project. I must say that we still learned how to create detailed and readable mind maps, but that’s material for another article;)

As a result, at the first stage of website design creation we started to receive three important documents at once: the structure of the site in the form of a map, technical recommendations from the developers and a detailed prototype with texts. The result did not make us wait: the number of edits became many times less, there was enough time left for the design to work out in detail each element of the site, already agreed in the prototype. The quality of project implementation has risen to a new level.

In the current projects we plan to introduce the practice of more in-depth testing of prototypes by involving a focus group of potential users and having them perform tasks to analyze the usability of our interface.

Five Steps to Improvement

And now I’ll get to the most interesting part – what you need to do to achieve this:

  • Involve a specialist, ideally a UX-designer, who only deals with prototyping sites and preferably writes texts for them.
  • The team of designers to maximally pump skills in professional programs for building prototypes mockups and figma.
  • Tighter link web designers with developers. At the analytics stage, parallelize the creation of TOR and prototype. UX-designer, developing a prototype, should constantly consult with developers and in general with all participants of the process.
  • For complex structured sites, we introduce the practice of drawing up mind maps. This document should clearly illustrate the entire structure of the future site.
  • At the prototyping stage, involve the client more often in the discussion of the project, so as not to miss anything important, to understand his expectations. At this stage it is easier to correct something and the cost of error is not yet high.

What are the requirements for a UX-designer?

A person should be as demanding to himself and others as possible, be able to find elegant solutions in conditions of data shortage, communicate competently and write simple thesis texts, not be afraid to ask questions, and be proficient in figma-type programs. It is not necessary for him to be a talented designer, it is more important to have a developed logical and spatial thinking, to have at least basic knowledge in marketing and pr, to be able to generate a lot of ideas. It is good if he will be: self-organized, communicative, able to interview and control deadlines.