Process: Deliverables

While wireframes, prototypes, and interactive design prototypes often steal the spotlight, solid UX design documentation remains the unsung hero in creating a successful user experience. Neglecting documentation can lead to inconsistent branding, confused stakeholders, and products that fall short of their full potential.

But let’s be honest: creating documentation doesn’t sound nearly as glamorous as crafting sleek user interfaces or conducting user interviews. Nevertheless, its impact is undeniable. Clear, well-structured UX design documentation acts as the glue that binds vision, design, and execution together. It bridges the gaps between teams, ensures design consistency, and helps maintain clarity from ideation to deployment. Read More

A prototype is a primitive representation or version of a product that a design team or front-end-development team typically creates during the design process. The goal of a prototype is to test the flow of a design solution and gather feedback on it—from both internal and external parties—before constructing the final product. The state of a prototype is fluid as the team revises the design iteratively based on user feedback.

Why Are Prototypes Important?

Tom and David Kelley of the design company IDEO have perfectly summed up the importance of prototyping by saying:

“If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a prototype is worth 1,000 meetings.” Read More

Until recently, I never saw the value in customer journey maps. In fact, throughout my career, I’ve even struggled with the value of personas and scenarios. Many times, stakeholders would just skim over them after our presentations or use them only to prove we were making progress on a project. Design teams, with the best intentions, made every effort to keep personas alive and breathing, only to succumb to other project pressures that demanded annotation, use cases, and itemized requirements.

So why have I written an article on the value of customer journey maps? How did I manage to reach the conclusion that customer journey maps are not only a worthy and effective tool, but also a crucial element on large, enterprise user experience (UX) projects? Because I saw them have a significant impact on a recent project with The Boeing Company, and I’m now a believer.

In this article, I’ll attempt to illustrate the virtues of customer journey maps, the necessary ingredients that make them an intelligent deliverable that encourages conversation and collaboration, and the role they can play in effecting real change in large organizations. Read More