UX Design Deliverables Guide and Steps You Should Know

Quick Summary: Do you find developing or enhancing your digital services impossible because you have no idea what it lacks or requires? Don’t worry. We have your back. What you need is UX deliverables. But now, what is it? We have provided a detailed guide below that’ll solve all your problems.

UX deliverables are a deep topic and lengthy to explore and understand, but we have made it easy for you. The deliverables have documents like research phase documents and design phase documents. It helps brands get ideas, data, and valuable byproducts. Deliverables can either be as small as a single paper document or something that takes space up to terabytes.

UX designers provide deliverables according to the needs and goals of the customers. It can direct and authenticate design choices with its data driven insights. Team members can proactively handle the challenges with deliverables like wireframes and prototypes. However, let’s start by determining what UX deliverables are and exploring the list of services.

What are UX Deliverables?

User experience deliverables are document drafts and designs containing communication ideas, research data, and byproducts of the design process. It also encompasses important project information that guides development teams. The list of deliverables remains almost the same for startups or established firms of different industries.

List of Most Common Design Deliverables

The list of deliverables has two major groups - one is the research phase, and the other is the design phase. Both phases hold significance and can’t function without each other. But what are these phases?

Research Phase: This phase helps us determine the user's needs based on how they interact with digital products or from the reviews and feedback they give. The research phase stands on four pillars - Discovery, Exploring, Testing, and Listening. The research phase comprises user and UI/UX research data.

Design Phase: We understand and define user behavior from data-driven insights to create multiple prototypes. Then, everyday users will test these prototypes, and the most intuitive and easy-to-navigate design will be selected. It has two subgroups - the UX and UI design phases.

Now, we will explore the list of services each phase of UX design deliverables provides.

Research Phase

User Research

User research has always remained an integral part of the design. Every digital product that develops without user research fails in the initial years of it. It is like a strong foundation on which the building of great UI/UX designs is made. We get essential user insights from a broader audience to understand their emotions, behavior, and what they need.

We can use multiple research methods such as individual and group interviews, field studies, and various surveys to get all the insights. The user data from these methods helps create documents with user personas, significant outcomes, and critical recommendations. We also use mind mapping, collaborative wireframing, and card sorting to ease this process and get better results.

UI/UX Research Data

A kind of user research, UI/UX research data provides information about user interactions with an interface to inform design decisions. However, unlike user research data, this data is collected mainly from the current or potential users of the service. It works on a channelized vision focusing on specific services or product interactions. Designers explore and include different components of UX in this data.

We survey our direct competitors’ digital services or products to determine their strengths and weaknesses. Methods like usability testing, surveys, and A/B testing help us get crucial design information, allowing us to make better designs. We can also use analytics tools, testing platforms, and software to implement the above methods.

Business Goals

You can’t start your design phase if you don’t know your business goals. Even if you start without determining goals, you will find yourself at the point Nemo of the design phase. And the chances of your design becoming a failure will go up to 100%. Always spend some time determining your business goals. Once you know your business goals, it will be easier for you to scale.

Ask yourself What, why, and how; it will ease the objective clarification process. The process should only include the challenge being tackled, the recommended approach, and the market analysis overview. The whole research phase focuses on making the design more user-centric

Design Phase

Information Architecture

This phase begins once the research phase is over. It is a type of mind map where we structure and arrange data from the research phase in a website or an app. We use it to build a futuristic product or upgrade the current version of the product. We include stakeholders in this mind mapping, giving them a bird' s-eye view and helping them visualize the overall project.

Wireframes

A simple skeletal framework that contains lines and shapes represents the design's core functionality. We can use low and high-fidelity wireframes to meet our needs. Both of them are useful in different aspects. We use wireframing in this design phase because it allows us to iterate on ideas and helps us get feedback from users and stakeholders.

Interactive prototype

An unavoidable stage in the UX design phase, the interactive prototype’s importance is ten times more than the actual product. The beta version allows users to navigate and interact with the design according to the planned task flow and scenario. It also helps us test hypotheses, refine design concepts, and pinpoint areas of improvement in our designs.

User Journey

User Journey functions from the data about a series of steps a user takes and determines how users are reacting or how they will potentially react to it. It helps designers think about the content and functionalities of the design while creating user flows. User journey illustrates a bigger picture where designers focus on the user’s goals, personas, motivations, pain points, and what they want to achieve.

Visual design mockups

Once we decide on the best wireframe for our digital product, we move on to visual designing. It is an integral part of the UI design phase. We create the visual designs according to brand guidelines. Different product design user experiences require different visual requirements, so we develop mockups for them.

Design system

It is a toolkit with powerful tools that helps brands make their service more impactful and easier to navigate. This kit has three significant tools - A style guide, a components library, and UX guidelines documents. A style guide helps design principles, describing visual identity, while a components library provides sketches of different UI elements, and UX guidelines describe design patterns with implementation directions.

Design specification

It is a document that gives visual elements, engagement patterns, and a design framework for a UI. It helps us determine what criteria a product needs to meet. For example, if you have business-to-business (B2B) services or digital products, then it should fulfil the requirements of B2B. If the product is for business to the customer (B2C), then it should follow the design specifications of B2C.

Conclusion

These deliverables are the most effective when creating a user-centric, intuitive, and easy-to-navigate design. Our experts make these documents according to the needs of the project. Some documentation starts early, while some go parallel to other documents. We transfer all the user experience design project deliverables via Dropbox or Google Drive folder along with the ownership of it.

You can get all these deliverables tailored to your project needs from TheFinch Design. Here, we dedicate ourselves to your project goals so that your digital services, like websites, applications, etc., become market leaders. You can connect with us to get more specifications about each deliverable.