Product needs include: Data requirements, Functional requirements, Contextual requirements, Business requirements, Brand requirements, Experience requirements, Technical requirements, Customer/partner requirements.

It's vital to understand the problem we're solving before jumping to solutions. Some ways I accomplish this are through stakeholder interviews, market research, reviewing existing analytics and customer usage data. I do my best to understand the why not just the what. 

It's also important to list all the knowledge we currently have about the problem into a list of assumptions ordered by risk. That serves as a baseline for future discovery & research. 

Next step is to conduct user research to validate our assumptions and get a more complete understanding of the problems users are facing that if solved could help us achieve our objective. I involve as many team members as possible with planning and conducting this research.

Contextual inquiry is a great way of doing this, but there are other kinds of generative research I can use as well including: customer Feedback, data analysis, email surveys, ethnographic studies, focus groups, Monkey surveys, Open Card Sorting, participatory design, stakeholder interviews, user interviews, heat-map.

Next is debriefing and determining design requirements that can help us achieve the business goals. This includes meeting as a team to share notes and come to a shared understanding of what was learned. 

The goal at the end of this stage is to have an accurate understanding of our users, details around the jobs to be done, and validation of our previous assumptions. Some useful tools in this stage include:  contextual Scenario, Empathy Maps, Job To Be Done Profiles, Journey Maps, Personas, Research Participant Summary

I start out with sketches or low-fidelity wireframes and move into full-fidelity as I get feedback from users and the rest of the team. My goal is to explore many ideas and & validate them as quickly as possible, bringing in more fidelity as ideas get validated. 

One important note here is that I show in-progress work to the team and thrive in environments where this is the culture. It's vital to get feedback from dev, designers and other stakeholders before spending too much time on any design so that there is still time to pivot based on that feedback. 

Tools here include: Wireframes, Validation Scenarios, Mockups, Rapid Prototypes, In-depth Prototypes

This step is really important. It will validate or invalidate the proposed design solution. I try as much as possible to use real users to run those testings. Some methods include: 5-second test, A/B or Multivariate Testing, Usability Benchmarking, Usability Testing (Moderated remote, Unmoderated remote)

Once the design has been validated by users, time is come to support dev during implementing it.

If the job during the design review session with dev has been efficient, there should be no surprise during the implementation phase…but you never know.

In this phase I’m a tester and I’m here to ensure designs are getting implemented correctly.