The User Interface Design Process (opens in new tab)

Articles like this one give content marketing a bad name. It’s disappointingly lacking in details. It’s main purpose is to sell a product, not to inform, and it shows. Let me give you a summary of 90% of its contents:

- Research who will use your product and how it will be used.

- Start with paper and pencil sketches. It’s faster than other methods.

- Turn those sketches into digital mockups. Fill in details.

- Have someone else look at your stuff.

The few other comments on this thread already provide more insight into the UI design process. I wish more content marketers spent more time on the content part.

I suffered through a few seasons of having some UI designers who obsessed over doing the _whole process_ despite our target UI was for maybe 6 in-house users and was to expose the front-end on a work-in-progress system that changed heavily over time. I learned two main things from that experience (that likely doesn't apply when you have millions of users):

1. The "sketch" step yields about 80% of what you'll benefit from the whole process. If you can't do anything else, at least do that.

2. Very often, getting something, anything, built and working, and letting your users test and critique it will reveal far more than any amount of thoughtful design process will.

I have a hard time taking a supposedly user-focused design resource seriously when they set paragraph text in a bold sans serif font. Not reader-friendly. Anybody who's been to design school would learn not to do that in Type 1. It might be a valuable resource, but that's not the right way to get off on the right foot, especially with a design-savvy user-base.

An approach that I was taught in an interaction design course (taken from SIGCHI research) that doesn't seem to be used much, is to have a sample of intended users design what they think they want (with simple approaches like pencil and paper, pasting UI widgets on paper, etc.), and then have the designer synthesize and refine those ideas into something more polished/concrete utilizing their own knowledge of the principles of the medium. This helps to more accurately reflect the mental models of users, and sometimes even helps elucidate functional requirements for the overall project that may not be readily apparent. This probably mostly works for internal/enterprise development where the overarching goal of the software being built is commonly understood by the user base, rather than a greenfield consumer facing product.

In the 10+ years designing for mostly Software companies [1] (large and small) I found that the most important aspect of Interface design is the continuous cycle of eliminated things. Sketching and planning on paper is nice (and a must), but you are always wrong in the beginning. We usually only work with companies that have a working product, because we found that Interface Design is less critical in the early stages. A good UI can help you grow faster, but not necessarily achieve product market fit. In the beginning, UI isn’t all that important and you can go far with something decent. Once you have a working product and users, that’s when you can start the simplification process in order to pave the road for smoother growth. User Interface design can be summarised as: Eliminating obstacles from the user’s experience and remove as much friction as possible.

[1]https://fairpixels.pro

Maybe I’m just grumpy today, but this looks like poorly written marketing blog spam with zero useful advice. The product it’s promoting gives you very trite fake “briefs”, like this:

> I would like you to create an interface design of an on/off switch. Can you do that?