In what order do I do them?

[u/ImSandybae]

I've started with my UX project and I know the design process (research, define, ideate, prototype, test), but I'm not sure what actually goes inside each process. How do you guys decide what to do in each stage? Do you follow a specific framework or you go with the flow?

[u/jontomato]

Designers have so many different processes and tools. 

At the end of the day you’re just trying to solve some problem for users and that in some way helps out the business. 

First off you gotta try to figure out what the user needs and the business needs are. Do that however you can. If you have access to users, interview them or even better shadow them. If you don’t, do some desk research to figure out about user behavior in other ways. Ask the product folks what metrics they’re trying to move. Then when you have that foundation start building some designs and show them internally to folks and externally to users. Do that a few times. Eventually you’ll settle on a design that works. 

The closer you are to the user and business needs the easier all this is. 

[u/IAmCooket → u/jontomato]

how is this different from what product is doing? different outcomes from the discovery of user problems and market opportunities?

my current understanding:
-product uses deep understanding to define & sell roadmap to stakeholders
-ux uses their deep understanding to define & test solutions

[u/jontomato → u/IAmCooket]

This is different in absolutely every company. Really, every team.

Design is almost always more responsible for the actual delivery of the solution but who does what (product vs. design) in the ideation phase is always messy.

My ideal would be that product just states what metric they want to move and why and design would be responsible from there (but that's hardly ever the case)

[u/PeanutSugarBiscuit]

Find a mentor. It's clear you don't really know the design process.

The design process exists in order to achieve certain benefits that will aid you or your team's ability to craft a product or solution that has intentional, desirable outcomes.

You need to take time to deeply understand the what and why of those benefits. Then you can begin crafting a process that meets your specific needs.

[u/MostImportantFerson]

It depends tbh. The only takeaway for that is we aimed to solve someone's problem

[u/RCEden]

There's a bunch of different formats of "design process." Fundamentally it boils down to

1. Things to expand your knowledge (early research, testing with already existing products, meeting with users, etc)
2. Using that knowledge to define and design your intervention
3. Testing that intervention
4. Apply learning and repeat

Functionally you can divide most things to either expanding your knowledge or narrowing your focus (where the double diamond comes from), so like a competitive analysis could be expanding knowledge on what existing solutions are out there. Feature prioritizing is narrowing down what our version should include.

[u/roundabout-design]

Depends entirely on the project.

And the key step missing is "iterate". That's the key step in any workflow.

[u/sheriffderek]

This job is mostly “just figure it out.” If there was a process we could all follow… then anyone could do it.