The most common tool, methods, processes, and deliverables that designers use throughout the digital product design process.
Published in · 12 min read · Jan 18, 2021
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This is an updated version of a list published a few years ago.
A map that displays all the touchpoints of the consumer with your brand, as well as the key internal processes involved in it. Useful to visualize the path followed by consumers across multiple channels and how you could improve that flow.
Related links:
- Service blueprint | Service Design Tools
- Service blueprint | Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Using service blueprints to design better workshops
- The many ways of mapping the customer journey
A diagram that explores the multiple (sometimes invisible) steps taken by consumers as they engage with a service. Allows designers to frame the consumer’s motivations and needs in each step of the journey, creating design solutions that are appropriate for each.
Related links:
- How to build a customer journey map
- The ultimate guide to customer journey mapping
- Experience maps, user journeys, and more…
- Customer journey maps — a ‘quick and dirty’ technique to create them
- Examples of customer journey mapping
- When to call B.S. on customer journey mapping
A relatable snapshot of the target audience that highlights demographics, behaviors, needs, and motivations through the creation of a fictional character. Personas make it easier for designers and digital teams to create empathy with consumers throughout the design process.
Related links:
- Personas: the foundation of a great user experience
- How much time does it take to create personas?
- A personas guideline, from what they are to how to use them
- Make your personas great again in 7 simple steps
- The problem with personas
A visualization of the company’s digital properties, the connections between them, and their purpose in the overall marketing strategy. Gives you insights around how to leverage new and existing assets to achieve the brand’s business goals.
Related links:
- Designing digital strategies: cartography
- End-to-end experience design
- Six empowerment strategies to get teams up to speed in complex domains
A comprehensive analysis of competitor products that maps out their existing features in a comparable way. Helps you understand industry standards and identify opportunities to innovate in a given area.
Related links:
- Essential ingredients for every competitive analysis
- Competitive analysis: understanding the market context
- Competitive analysis example
- Competitive analysis done right
- Competitive analysis: how to approach it effectively
A reductive process in the early stages of product definition that maps out the key aspects of it: what it is, who it is for, and when/where it will be used. Helps the team narrow down and create consensus around what the product will be.
Related links:
- Value proposition | Wikipedia
- How to create a value proposition
- Value proposition canvas template
- How I apply the Value Proposition Canvas to convince my clients to invest in customer research
- Every website needs a clear value proposition
Scripts for interviewing key stakeholders in a project, both internal and external, to gather insights about their goals. It helps prioritize features and define key performance indicators (KPIs).
Related links:
- The ultimate guide to stakeholder interviews: understand your clients
- Stakeholder interview template
- The UX process starts at stakeholder interviews, not user interviews
- Stakeholder interviews: asking the right questions
- A stakeholder interview checklist
Pre-stabilished criteria to measure progress toward strategic goals or the maintenance of operational goals. KPIs help inform design decisions along the way and is an indispensable tool to measure the impact of your design efforts.
Related links:
- Unleashing the power of a UX KPI
- KPI is an imperative tool for UX designers
- Measuring product design impact — KPIs, NPS, UX, WTF
- A metrics-driven approach to evaluate success of UX design
- A big list of UX KPIs and metrics
The collective process of generating constraint-free ideas that respond to a given creative brief. Allows the team to visualize a broad range of design solutions before deciding which one to stick with.
Related links:
- 13 unusual brainstorming methods that work
- 3 proven methods to organize a brainstorming session
- Effective brainstorming (without feeling lost)
- The myth of brainstorming
A collaborative collection of images and references that will eventually evolve into a product’s visual style guide. Allows designers and clients to align on a look for the product before investing too much time in it.
Related links:
- Use your inspiration — a guide to mood boards
- Using moodboards in the design process
- How to create mood boards that inspire: 20 pro tips
A comic strip that illustrates the series of actions that consumers take while using the product. Translates functionalities into real-life situations, helping designers create empathy with the consumer while having a first look at the product scope.
Related links:
- How UX storyboards can transform your creative process
- 17 reasons to use storyboards in UX design
- Storyboarding in the software design process
- How to storyboard experiences
- Using comic strips and storyboards to test your UX concepts
A visual representation of the user’s flow to complete tasks within the product. It’s the user perspective of the site organization, making it easier to identify which steps could be improved or redesigned.
Related links:
- User flow is the new wireframe
- A UX designer’s guide to user flows
- Stop designing pages and start designing flows
- A shorthand for designing UI flows
- Why user flows are essential in our process
A breakdown of the required information and actions needed to achieve a task. Helps designers and developers understand the current system and its information flows. Makes it possible to allocate tasks appropriately within the new system.
Related links:
- Hierarchical task analysis
- One more time about task analysis and why you should master it
- Everything you need to know: human error in UX design
An exploration around multiple ways to categorize content and data: topics in a news site, product categories in an e-commerce, etc. Assists designers in defining the content structure to support the user’s and the organization’s goals.
Related links:
- Taxonomy: content strategy’s new best friend
- Ways to quick start a taxonomy from scratch
- Hierarchical taxonomy: UX design’s secret weapon
- Improving category taxonomy through card sorting and tree testing
The activity of listing all content available on a website. This list will come in handy at various stages of the project: see the big picture, define the content strategy, and check the details of each page.
Related links:
- Content Audit: when and why do you need it?
- From content audit to design insight: How a content audit facilitates decision-making
- How to conduct a content audit
- Paying down your product content debt
- How to give your web content a reality check using the R.E.A.L. method
A detailed analysis of a product that highlights good and bad practices, using known interaction design principles as guidelines. Helps you visualize the current state of the product in terms of usability, efficiency, and effectiveness of the experience.
Related links:
- Introduction to heuristic evaluation: a beginner’s guide
- What you really get from a heuristic evaluation
- Heuristic analysis for UX: How to run a usability evaluation
- Heuristic analysis in the design process
- How effective are heuristic evaluations?
One of the most classic IA deliverables: consists of a diagram of the website’s pages organized hierarchically. It makes it easy to visualize the basic structure and navigation of a website.
Related links:
- How to create a UX Sitemap: a simple guideline
- Personas, journey maps, sitemaps, and user flows — OH MY!
- Is the sitemap losing its client-facing steam?
A product’s evolution plan with prioritized features. It could be a spreadsheet, a diagram, a fully documented backlog, or a simple series of sticky notes. Shares the product strategy with the team and the road that needs to be taken to achieve its vision.
Related links:
- Getting from product strategy to product roadmap
- How to build a product roadmap
- Developing a product roadmap
- Effective product roadmaps
- Why your product roadmaps aren’t working, and how to fix them
A comprehensive list of scenarios that happen when users are interacting with the product: logged in, not logged in, first visit etc. Ensures that all possible actions are thoroughly considered, as well as the system behavior in each scenario.
Related links:
- Understanding use case analysis
- Smart UX: use cases
- Hows of documenting UX design
- Good users, bad users: from use cases to misuse cases
Analysis of the numbers provided by an analytics tool or your own database about how the user interacts with your product: clicks, navigation time, search queries, etc. Metrics can also “uncover the unexpected”, surfacing behaviors that are not explicit in qualitative user tests.
Related links:
- Beyond goals: site search analytics from the bottom up
- How metrics can make you a better designer
- 10 frameworks to help you measure success in design
- Data basics for UX people
A panel of people discussing a specific topic or question. Teaches about the users’ feelings, opinions, and even language. Useful when the target audience is new or unknown to the team.
Related links:
- Asking the right questions during user research, interviews and testing
- How to conduct user interviews
- How to design better products through user interviews
- How to conduct your first focus group and make it an effective one
- How to fix the 5 most common mistakes with focus groups
Questions that provide numbers as result. Quick and relatively inexpensive way of measuring user satisfaction and collecting feedback about the product. It could highlight the need for deeper qualitative tests and research.
Related links:
- 3 simple steps to design and analyze user-centric surveys
- UX Surveys: a quick guide to get the most out of them
- Better user research through surveys
- The user experience of surveys
- Two easy methods to design surveys for complex problems
One-to-one interviews in which the user is asked to perform a series of tasks in a prototype or a product. Validates and collects feedback on flows, design, and features.
Related links:
- Running a usability test
- Usability testing: what is it and how to do it?
- Analyzing usability testing data
- The art of guerrilla usability testing
- How to write a user testing report that people will actually read
A technique that consists of asking users to group content and functionalities into open or closed categories. Gives you input on content hierarchy, organization, and flow.
Related links:
- Basics on how to conduct card sorting
- 10 things to know about card sorting
- Card sorting: a definitive guide
Offering alternative versions of your product to different users and comparing the results to find out which one performs better. Great for optimizing funnels and landing pages.
Related links:
- The ultimate guide to A/B testing
- 7 steps of A/B testing
- 10 powerful ways to find ideas worth A/B testing
- A/B testing: Inside the technology that’s changing the rules of business
- A/B testing done wrong
A technology that analyzes the user’s eye movements across the interface. Provides data about what keeps users interested on the screen and how their reading flow could be optimized by design.
Related links:
A study to measure if the website can be used by everyone — including people with vision, listening, motion, cognitive, and other types of disability.
Related links:
- What accessibility is and why it’s so important
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
- Accessibility testing — W3C Wiki
- UX Myth: Accessibility is expensive and difficult
A quick way of visualizing a new interface by using paper and pen, or a digital software. Sketches are useful to quickly validate product concepts and design approaches both with team members and users.
Related links:
- How sketching can benefit your design practice
- Sketching tips to make you a better UX designer
- Why designers should all be sketching
- Sketching tips for UX designers who think they can’t sketch
- The messy art of UX sketching
A low-fidelity visual blueprint that represents the page structure, as well as its hierarchy and key elements. Useful to discuss ideas with team members and clients, and to assist the work of designers and developers, before going into high-fidelity, pixel-perfect deliverables.
Related links:
- How to start sketching and wireframing
- Why should product teams use wireframes more often?
- The 5-pass reduction wireframing: A minimalist UX technique
- The art of designing good wireframes
- Wireframes are useless
A prototype is a simulation of the website navigation and features, commonly using clickable wireframes or mockups. It’s a quick way to test and validate product flows, visuals, and experience before fully developing the product.
Related links:
- Why you should bring prototyping into your design process?
- Becoming a better designer through prototyping
- 7 tips for efficient prototyping
- Prototyping: the mother of invention
- Prototyping isn’t optional anymore
A hands-on library that provides examples (and code) of interaction design patterns to be used across the website. It not only promotes consistency but also makes it easier to improve and maintain elements as needed.
Related links:
- Getting started with pattern libraries
- Difference between a style guide, pattern library and a design system in pictures
- Why and how you should standardize the UI patterns in your pattern library
- Everything you need to know about Design Systems
- A design system is not a sticker sheet
Diary studies are a way to collect data from users over time. Participants self-report their behaviors, frustrations, opinions, desires, and aspirations at defined intervals or in response to carefully designed prompts or tasks.
Related links:
- Diary studies: a quick primer
- Why and how to conduct a diary study for a customer journey?
- DIY digital diary studies
Mental models are explanations of how users see the world. They influence product design every step of the way from the conception of an idea to the perception of an experience.
Related links:
- Mental models in product design
- Making better design decisions through mental models
- Mental models and the evolution of an idea
- Mental models in UX Design in examples
A Design Sprint is a unique five day process for validating ideas and solving big challenges through prototyping and testing ideas with customers.
- The Design Sprint | Google Ventures
- 5 tips on how to run a successful design sprint
- How to conduct effective virtual design sprints
- We need to talk about design sprints
- Design sprints are not for everyone
