The UX Design Process Explained using a Real Mobile App Project

Hello everyone. In today's video, we'll be walking through the UX design process using a real mobile app design project. Before we get into it, it's important to understand that the UX design process can be as dynamic as possible depending on the scope of your project, how much time you have, the size of the team, and the budget for the project. By the end of this video, you should understand what the UX design process looks like, what to do at each stage of the process, and the tools you need. If you have any questions while watching this video, please leave a comment and I'll be sure to respond. Without wasting any much time, let's get into it. The project we're going to be using to walk through this process together is the design of a self-guided remote therapy app. This app enables people suffering from depression, anxiety, and stress to get help using self-guided therapy. They can also book one-to-one sessions with professional therapists if they feel like they need more help. The design process we are going to be using is called the design thinking process. It is a nonlinear and iterative process that enables designers to tackle design challenges in a structured manner. What do I mean by nonlinear and iterative? I mean that you don't necessarily need to follow every step of the process. Instead, you can go back and forth on different steps of the process depending on your findings and the project requirements. The design thinking process encourages designers to empathize with the users, understand and define their problems, develop ideas, prototype solutions, and test these solutions. Let's start by discussing what happens at the first stage of the design thinking process, which is the empathize stage. The empathize stage is where you try to understand who the user is. You try to empathize with them. You try to understand what their pain point might be. You try to get what might frustrate them, what might motivate them, the kind of person they are. For this project, I conducted a couple of user research, but before getting into the user research, it's important to have a research plan. In your research plan, you would have some research objectives. You need to be able to understand the exact things that you want to gain from your research. What are you trying to find out from the research? If you're able to list out the things that you want to find or the things that you want to learn from your research, then you can understand the kind of research method to use. For this project, I conducted some qualitative research by interviewing a couple of people. I spoke to some therapists, I spoke to some people that have been in therapy, And I also spoke to people that have never been in therapy. I also conducted some qualitative research by administering surveys to understand what people think about therapy, how people get themselves out of situations where they might have required therapy, how people get themselves out of situations where they might be depressed or stressed, what are the other ways that people use to therapize themselves, and just to understand what people think about self-guided therapy and if it is a thing that they might be open to. These are some of the things that you could put in a survey, and these are some of the things that you could also understand from having one-to-one conversations with people. I also conducted a couple of desk research to see other journals, papers, articles that have been written about this same topic, just to understand the research that's been done by other people before I get into my own research. All these findings was what I bring together to be able to understand the users better and to be able to identify what their pain points might be. For this project, I used Google Forms for the surveys and I used Zoom to have one-to-one interviews with participants. Next, we'll move to the problem definition stage where we try to understand and define the problem by analyzing all the insights and findings from the user research at the empathize stage. The process of analyzing feedback and findings from user interviews is called affinity mapping. It involves finding similar themes and topics that the interview participants spoke about and categorizing them in groups that make sense to the researcher or designer. This is also called card sorting. For example, while carrying out the affinity mapping for this project, all the key points that was highlighted from the conversations and user interviews were grouped into cards according to their similarities and themes. Now you can find themes around pain points here, which is basically the difficulty that people had whenever they tried to access therapy. And a lot of things that they said there was around therapy being stereotypical, therapy being for the rich. You can also see behaviors, basically how people try to get better whenever they get into situations that threaten their mental health. And then you can also see the recommendation, the kind of things that people recommend on a self-guided or remote therapy app, basically the things that you can do to make the app better. And then you can also have the positives, the tools and technologies, and the common cases. So basically affinity mapping helps you to make sense of all the insights that you've gathered from the interview, all the points, all the facts that you've gathered, and all the topics that people have spoken about. It helps you to make sense of it as a designer. Helps you to group it into different cards so that you can find patterns that can help you to identify what the problem might be or even what the solution might be. The card sorting exercise also helps to identify the different kind of user personas that might represent the target users. User personas are fictional characters that are created based on research to represent the different user types that might use a service, product, or brand in a similar way. For this project, I was able to identify 3 personas. The first persona wants to seek therapy but can't afford to hire a professional. The second persona is someone that is more financially stable but can't find licensed therapists, while the third persona is a therapist that is looking to find clients online. It is important to keep in mind that not every design project requires user personas. Some projects are simply too large to narrow down to specific user personas. For example, think about all the different kinds of people that use an app like Instagram. That's over 1 billion users almost every day. It is going to be hard to find personas that actually represent all different types of people that use this kind of app. This is why the design process is not a one-size-fits-all. Quick one. If you're getting any value from this video, please like this video and hit the subscribe button. Other exercises that you can carry out at the problem definition stage includes empathy mapping, user journey maps, and problem statements. Again, this depends on your research objectives and the scope of your project, but one thing that is important is to make sure that you have a clear problem statement at the problem definition stage. This helps you to understand how to go into ideation, which is the next phase. For this project, I had 2 problem statements. The first problem statement was from the client's point of view. Which is finding a therapist and also trying to get self-guided therapy. While the second problem statement was from the therapist's point of view, which is trying to find clients online. Next, we move to the ideation stage where we generate ideas that can solve problems that have been identified at the previous stage. If you're working within a team, this is when you bring other members of the team together to brainstorm ideas and solutions together in a workshop setting. I like kicking off my ideation stage with how might we questions. How might we questions help me break up the problem statement into smaller questions that can create conversations and help the team to generate more ideas. For this project, the how might we questions are: 1. How might we provide self-guided therapy to people who can't afford one-to-one therapy? 2. How might we protect user privacy? Number 3, how might we match users to therapists and schedule therapy sessions? To answer these questions, I used the Crazy 8 Addition technique, which I absolutely love. It's a technique where workshop participants get to sketch 8 ideas in 8 minutes for each how might we question. This helps you as a facilitator to understand what the participant might be thinking about and also get their ideas in the truest and rawest form. Also, you're going to get a lot of ideas because they are sketching out 8 ideas for each question, then you're going to get different perspectives on what they might be thinking about. Also, this technique is very helpful to participants that are not confident about sharing their opinion, or they think about their opinions too much and are wary of the fact that people might not exactly accept what they think. But in workshop scenarios, everybody's opinion is welcome, and the Crazy 8 Addition Technique helps everybody to express themselves properly. For this project, the Crazy Ideation Technique helped me to identify some possible ideas, features, and solutions that might be useful for this app. These features include gratitude journals, AI matching agents, speech-to-text AI for journaling, meditation exercises, audio and video messaging, and so on. During the ideation phase, you can also conduct a competitive analysis of some existing solutions in the space. By understanding what their strengths and weaknesses might be and what the areas of opportunity might be and how you can stand out with your own solution. For this project, I analyzed one-to-one therapy apps like Talkspace and BetterHelp, and I also looked at mindfulness and meditation apps like Calm. I also proceeded to develop some of the ideas from the Crazy 8 Addition Technique further by sketching out some important screens. For the user interface. Next, we move to the prototyping phase where we create low and high fidelity prototypes of our solution. Most of the times I start the prototyping phase with low fidelity prototypes, and other times I just move straight to high fidelity, mostly because I have a design system in place that can guide me. Low fidelity prototypes help us to visualize design concepts early and identify some repeating components and patterns that can help users navigate the app easily. It is simply designing the user interface by using as little design details as possible. After creating the low fidelity prototypes, you can move to the high fidelity prototype, which represents the most functional and detailed version of the user interaction, covering the user interface, the user experience, and visual design. In order to keep the visual design and experience consistent across the app, it's always good to create a UI style guide consisting of reusable components and patterns. The final stage of the design thinking process is the testing phase. This is where you conduct usability tests to validate your design decisions and test your solutions using the prototype. It is always good to have a usability testing plan in place before you start conducting a usability test. This helps you to identify the features and functionalities that you want to test based on some hypotheses that you might have. After gathering insights from the usability test results, you can revisit any of the previous steps based on your findings from the test results. This is why the design thinking process is iterative and nonlinear. This is how I use the design thinking framework for a real mobile app design project. Remember that this framework is not a one-size-fits-all, so it shouldn't limit you in any way. Instead, it should act as a guide that helps you structure your design process. If you got value from this video, you can also watch another video I made on common mistakes beginner UX designers make and how to become a UX designer in 2023. Don't forget to like this video, share with your friends, and subscribe to my channel so you can get more videos like this. I'll see you in the next one.