General design planning

The design process can be summarized in three simple steps: learn about the problem, explore possible solutions, and verify the solutions that work in practice.

The following chapters will elaborate on those steps to detail specific activities that can help you move through the process:

• Research: You cannot solve a problem if you don't understand it well. Learning about your users, their needs, and motivations is essential in order to solve their problems. Research techniques will help you get this knowledge and analyze it.
• Explore ideas: Given a problem, there is no single possible solution. Problems involving people normally have many potential solutions. Innovative ideas can be found quickly with an exploration process based on sketching.
• Mobile patterns: In order to meet the basic expectations of your mobile users, you'll need to follow the conventions on the different mobile platforms.
• Detail your solution: Communicating your ideas clearly is essential in a team. Design tools allow you to move your idea from the abstract to a more detailed representation.
• Prototyping: Design solutions are not static. To evaluate your ideas, you need to recreate how users interact with them. The prototyping process allows us to simulate our ideas without the effort needed to build them. Picking the right tool for the job is also part of the process.
• Prototyping with motion: Visual tools that embrace the concept of time are powerful prototyping tools. They provide control on how to communicate with motion by defining transitions and animations with great detail.
• Prototyping with code: Another perspective of prototyping is using code. Translating the prototyping concepts to code is a powerful approach to prototype your ideas.
• User testing: You don't know whether things work or not until they are used in practice. If you are able to recreate how an idea will work with a prototype, you can put it in the hands of a user and learn how well it will work.

This process is iterative in nature. Although it is described as a sequence of steps, you'll experience many different iterations for different parts of the product. Moving back and forth is totally expected and the results of each step will inform the next move.

For example, based on the results of testing a prototype of the general idea for your app, you can go back to learning about the problem, exploring more solutions on the drawing board, looking for a completely different approach, or further detailing your existing solution focusing on a specific aspect.

As with all chapters in this book, a Being pragmatic section will provide some advice in applying the design process in practice.