My UX design process is a continuous cycle of discovery, conceptualizing, communication, testing, and validation. The end goal is to build a digital product that satisfies users’ needs, in a way that is useful to them, and easy to understand. My process can be summarized into 5 phases:

Understanding - Getting a feel for the problem space. Communicating and empathising with people involved, finding gaps that can be filled in currently available solutions.

Exploration - Brainstorming and prototyping possible solutions to turn the ideas into concrete examples. Testing the general concept with users to see if it works to solve their problem.

Refinement - Fleshing out the MVP into a complete product. Testing ideas that are new to the users, to catch any points that are confusing. Improve the ideas before resources are spent to develop it.

Development - Coding of the product. Providing design support for the developers, and conducting the user acceptance test or beta test before the launch.

Review - After the product has been launched, evaluate its effectiveness, take in feedback, re-scope these into design problems and prioritize the problems to solve. Repeat the 5 steps from the start to continually improve the product.

Note: Each project is different, and the UX process shown in the chart above is not necessarily linear. Steps may be skipped in smaller projects. There may be times that I will need to take a step back as well. For example, an early user test with a low-fidelity prototype may show that the solution fails to solve the users’ needs. This failure is not a bad thing, as it brings me closer to a good solution, by proving what not to build. However, it does mean that I may need to go back to the Understanding stage to re-define the problem.