UX Product Design process; here is an attempt to summarize it in 12 questions.

The most challenging part for designers, is how to align your design process to your organization’s development process? I thought of simplifying the design process down to the level of a series of questions. The ownership of these questions and processes to find answers will give you your own design process.

Typical product development teams are based on the Trio of product development, namely the Product manager, Development Manager, and the UX designer. Product manager represents customer facing roles, and more or less the product decisions owner. Development team represents the technology development and QA teams, and the UX designer represents the whole of the UX team. I have tried to map the ownerships of these questions as well in the given table.

UX Product Design process summarized in 12 Questions

1. Who are my target users?
2. What are their top pain points?
3. What is the solution, and what are its benefits?
4. What are the parts of the solution?
5. What parts of the solution, customers will pay for?
6. What are the priorities I should define for different parts?
7. How does the solution look like and behave?
8. Will my users be able to learn, and easily use the product?
9. What technology is available with us?
10. How can we integrate all the required parts of the solution?
11. How can we sell this solution?
12. Did users found the solution Useful, Learnable, and Usable?

The ownership of these questions would be with different roles within the team, namely User researcher, Product Manager, UX Designer, Visual Designer, Development team, QA Team, Marketing person, and so on. Actually, I have seen co-ownership of select questions by more than one roles as well. Rarely, we will find team members with ‘all’ of these roles being available in teams, team members often wear different caps during the development process.

Development teams should understand the skills available within the team, and define their design process by asking and getting answers to these 12 questions.