Creating a product people actually want to use doesn’t just happen.
The problem is too many companies still only rely on their assumptions.
They jump straight into building features without understanding their users first and end up with software that works but doesn’t deliver real value.
The solution is a structured UX design process.
It cuts risks, saves time, and leads to a products that both works well and feels intuitive.
In this article, we’ll discuss walk you through the entire UX design process from start to finish, top UX design frameworks you can use, and how to measure UX design success.
Let’s dive in!
Key takeaways:
User research is the foundation. Real insights into behaviors, pain points, and motivations shape every design decision and keep your team focused on real user needs.
Design is iterative. From wireframes to prototypes, testing early and often uncovers usability issues before they become costly.
Collaboration drives better results. Involving business, technical, and design teams from the start ensures solutions are both user-friendly and feasible to build.
Measuring UX proves its value. Tracking adoption, task success, and satisfaction shows design’s real impact on both users and business outcomes.
Table of Contents
Top UX design frameworks
First, let’s cover the top UX design frameworks you can use throughout your UX design process.
Design Thinking
Design Thinking has become the go-to approach for projects where you need to balance user needs with business goals and technical realities.
It starts with empathy, i.e. understanding what users actually need.
Then it moves into clearly defining the problems worth solving, brainstorming ideas, building quick prototypes, and testing them with real users.
What makes Design Thinking stand out is its flexibility. It’s not a rigid checklist you follow once and move on.
You can always circle back when you get new insights, which creates a feedback loop that leads to better and more creative solutions.
Another strength of Design Thinking is its collaborative nature.
Cross-functional teams work together from the start, so your solution is not only valuable for users but also viable from a business perspective and realistic to build.
That mix of creativity, iteration, and teamwork is what makes it ideal for building software that truly works.
User-Centered Design (UCD)
User-Centered Design (UCD) puts users at the core of every design decision, maintaining focus on real user needs throughout design and development.
This approach is essential if user adoption directly impacts your software’s success.
UCD means involving users at every stage of the process. From early research to final testing, you’re gathering real feedback and using it to shape each design decision.
And with tools like user personas, journey maps, and usability testing, you can focus on what people actually want to achieve and where they might get stuck.
What makes this approach so effective is how it challenges your assumptions early on.
Instead of building features just because stakeholders asked for them, UCD makes sure every part of the product solves a real problem for end-users.
Double Diamond
The Double Diamond framework visualizes design as two phases: discovering the right problem and developing the right solution.
Each diamond represents a cycle of divergent thinking (exploring possibilities) followed by convergent thinking (focusing and delivering).
It also encourages cross-functional teams to share responsibility for outcomes. That makes communication faster and decisions more straightforward.
Lean UX is especially useful in custom software projects where requirements often change.
In those cases, documentation can quickly become outdated before development is finished. By testing ideas early and often, you make sure your time and budget go into features that actually matter to your users.
Agile UX
Agile UX brings user experience into the agile development process.
Designers work side by side with developers and stakeholders in sprints, shaping the product as it grows.
You keep working on new updates with based on user feedback, so your product improves step by step as you get new insights.
This way, your team stays flexible and responsive while keeping user needs front and center – even when technical challenges or deadlines start to pile up.
UX Honeycomb
The UX Honeycomb highlights seven key parts of user experience: useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, credible, and valuable.
Think of it as a checklist that keeps each part in focus during the design process.
It pushes teams to look beyond function and consider the emotional and contextual side of the product too. That way, no critical user need gets overlooked.
The UX honeycomb is especially helpful in complex applications where different types of users interact with different features.
It helps you see the big picture, making sure the product works well, feels right, and delivers real value.
UX design process: step-by-step
Next, we’ll discuss every step of the UX design process in more detail.
Project definition and scope planning
Every successful UX project starts with crystal-clear objectives and aligned expectations.
This first phase lays the foundation for everything that follows.
It’s especially important in custom software projects, where scope creep or changing priorities can quickly derail your progress.
The goal here is to set direction and make sure everyone is working toward the same outcomes.
Measurable objectives connect business results with user needs, and they become the reference point for every design decision that follows.
A useful way to frame them is through the SMART goals framework:
This helps you turn broad ambitions into concrete targets you can track.
These goals also act as checkpoints later on, helping you monitor progress and make adjustments before small issues escalate.
With clear goals, it’s easier to prioritize features and keep the project focused on what matters most.
And that is critical in larger projects, where multiple stakeholders often have competing priorities.
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Collaboration early on is just as important as defining goals.
Involving people from business, product, and technical roles helps you define requirements, limits, and risks before they slow you down.
Kickoff workshops, stakeholder interviews, and open discussions all contribute to a shared understanding. Measurable goals ensure everyone’s always on the same page.
The outcome is a documented agreement on objectives, scope, and timelines. To get there, focus on:
Key requirements and limits
Assumptions and risks
Business goals vs. user needs
Shared priorities
Clear scope and timelines
This upfront effort saves time later.
It reduces miscommunication, makes risks visible early, and prevents the kind of scope creep that pushes deadlines and breaks budgets.
Timeline and key deliverables
Timeline: 1-2 weeks
Key deliverables: Project alignment document, problem statement, success metrics, stakeholder interview summary, assumptions and risks
User research and discovery
Understanding your users isn’t optional. It’s the foundation of good UX design.
This phase grounds every decision in real needs instead of assumptions, which reduces one of the biggest risks in development.
Direct research methods like interviews, surveys, and observations help you see how users behave, what motivates them, and where they struggle.
The best approach blends qualitative insights — the “why” behind user behavior — with quantitative data that shows what users actually do.
Skipping this step can lead to wasted effort, as you end up building features that don’t solve real user problems.
Then, there’s market research and competitor analysis.
They provide benchmarks and reveal opportunities. They show which features are baseline expectations – the things users assume will be there – versus features that can set you apart.
The real value of research comes when your turn your findings into actionable insights which give the whole team a shared understanding of user needs and challenges.
And they become key reference points for every design choice you make.
Timeline and key deliverables
Timeline: 2-3 weeks
Key deliverables: User research report, market research, competitor analysis
Analysis and information architecture
This step takes your research and turns it into a clear structure.
The goal is to make complex features easy to understand and fit how people actually use the product.
User personas are a key starting point.
They translate your user research into relatable user profiles, helping the team design for real user groups instead of edge cases or based on their own assumptions.
For a deeper dive on why user personas are important, check out this explainer by our Product Designer, Antonija Veselski:
Here’s the key thing to remember – good personas go beyond demographics. They capture user goals, pain points, behaviors, and context.
Journey mapping comes next.
It shows the full path users take, including their actions, emotions, and frustrations. This highlights pain points and reveals where improvements can have the biggest impact.
Optimizing even small steps in the journey can lead to measurable gains in engagement and completion rates.
Once you understand the journey, you can start shaping your design’s structure.
Sitemaps lay out how information is organized. User flows break down the steps required to complete tasks and expose points of friction.
Together, these blueprints guide the design process and help you define technical requirements and information architecture early on.
For complex software, clear information architecture is what prevents cluttered, overwhelming interfaces.
Timeline and key deliverables
Timeline: 1-2 weeks
Key deliverables: User personas, user journeys, user flow diagrams, problem statements
Ideation and concept development
Once you’ve built a clear picture of your users and their needs, it’s time to start creating solutions.
Ideation is where creativity meets research – you explore possibilities but stay grounded in real insights.
Brainstorming works best when it’s open and collaborative. Techniques like mind mapping and sketching encourage fresh thinking and help your team challenge assumptions.
The key is to separate idea generation from evaluation.
First, you pitch ideas without limits. Then, you narrow ideas down based on what’s practical.
Bring in both technical and business voices at this stage to keep concepts ambitious but still feasible.
Methods like MoSCoW or RICE make it easier to balance user needs and business goals with technical constraints.
This is often where tough choices happen, because deciding what not to build can be just as important as deciding what to build.
Early design concepts then bring these ideas to life.
Rough sketches, storyboards, or quick low-fidelity prototypes turn abstract ideas into something real.
They invite feedback early and reveal technical hurdles before you sink too much time, money, and effort into something that doesn’t work.
Timeline and key deliverables
Timeline: 1 week
Key deliverables: Feature prioritization, concept sketches, low-fidelity wireframes and prototypes
Wireframing and low-fidelity prototyping
This phase is about structure and flow.
Wireframes focus on layout, content, and functionality before visual details distract from core usability.
Starting here keeps everyone on the same page about how your product should work, not just how it should look.
Good wireframes are simple, clear, and consistent.
They show hierarchy, navigation, and content organization in a way that’s easy to understand but flexible enough to evolve later.
In enterprise projects, for examples, they’re especially useful for explaining complex workflows.
Adding interactivity takes wireframes further.
Clickable prototypes let people move through flows and complete tasks as if they were using the real product.
This makes it easier to spot usability issues early, when they’re still quick and inexpensive to fix.
Regular reviews with stakeholders are also crucial.
Feedback at this stage ensures the structure works for everyone and prevents expensive redesigns later. The key is to keep the focus on flow and functionality, not visual polish.
High-fidelity design brings in branding, color, typography, and imagery while keeping the structure and usability from earlier phases intact.
Strong visual design does more than look good.
It creates hierarchy, supports accessibility, and makes the interface feel polished and professional.
The challenge is balance – designs should reflect the brand but never get in the way of users completing their tasks.
Prototypes at this level feel close to the finished product.
They have details like transitions and interactions, giving stakeholders and developers a clear picture of what the finished product is supposed to look like.
More importantly, users can test something that feels almost real, which produces far more reliable feedback than static screens.
To keep everything consistent, this is also where you create a design system.
A good design system is worth it’s weight in gold.
It makes sure styles, components, and patterns are uniform across every screen and platform. It also speeds up development, reduces inconsistencies, and makes scaling or adding new features much easier.
They serve as a checklist to catch common design problems and ensure your product meets basic usability standards.
Pairing heuristics with user tests will give you both expert and real-world perspectives.
But, the key is in how you analyze feedback.
Look for patterns that confirm strong design choices or highlight what needs fixing. Focus on issues that stop users from completing tasks rather than minor preferences.
Iteration is where usability testing shows its real value.
Each cycle of testing and refinement makes the product easier, faster, and more enjoyable to use.
The goal isn’t perfection, of course. It’s steady progress based on how real people engage with your product.
Open conversations about technical limits and design goals prevent misunderstandings and reduce rework later.
This also helps ensure the final product looks and works how it’s supposed to.
Clear design specifications are essential, especially for complex flows and edge cases.
They give developers precise direction on layouts, interactions, and visual elements. Without them, you risk misunderstandings that slow development down or hurt usability.
And quality assurance ties everything together.
Thorough QA checks confirm the product matches the design, works across devices, and meets standards for usability and accessibility.
This step usually uncovers small bugs, but solving them here prevents bigger problems after launch. The goal is to deliver a product that feels polished and consistent from day one.
Designing a great product experience isn’t just about how it looks or how easy it feels to use.
It’s also about proving that design decisions create real impact – for users and for your business.
Research shows that even a modest increase in UX investment can deliver a huge return. A 10% boost in UX budget can lead to as much as an 83% jump in conversions.
That’s why measurement isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s what will help you understand what’s working, justify UX investment, and make smarter choices moving forward.
You need to track 2 things: what users are able to do with your product and how satisfied they are with the experience.
Some of the most important performance indicators include:
Task success rate – How many users can complete critical tasks without running into major problems.
Time on task – The average time it takes a user to finish an action.
Error rate – How often people make mistakes along the way.
Adoption rate – The percentage of new users who start using a feature after it’s released.
Retention rate – How many users return over time.
Drop-off rate – The percentage of users who abandon a task midway.
Conversion rate – The number of users who complete a desired action, such as signing up, upgrading, or purchasing.
Measuring efficiency and accuracy is only half the story, though.
You also need to understand how people feel about your product, and that comes from metrics like:
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) – A quick check on whether users are happy after a specific interaction.
System usability scale (SUS) – A standardized way of rating overall usability.
Net promoter score (NPS) – A measure of whether users would recommend the product to others.
Customer effort score (CES) – How easy it is for users to complete a task or resolve an issue.
Churn rate feedback – Understanding why users leave can be as valuable as knowing why they stay.
Qualitative feedback – Insights from open-ended survey questions, user interviews, or in-app feedback tools.
What matters most here is the trend over time.
Are you moving toward a product that’s easier, faster, and more enjoyable to use?
That’s the true measure of a successful UX design: a product that helps people get things done effortlessly while leaving them with a positive impression they’ll remember.
UX design process: FAQs
For a typical project, the full UX design process usually takes 8–12 weeks.
That covers everything from research and ideation to testing and handoff.
But the exact timeline depends on your project’s size, scope, and complexity. A simple app with a few core features will move faster than an enterprise platform with multiple user groups and workflows.
It’s also worth noting that the process isn’t strictly linear.
Some steps overlap, and you’ll often loop back as new insights come in. Iteration is part of the process — testing what you’ve built, learning from users, and making improvements.
That’s why it’s better to think of the UX design process as cycles of learning and refinement rather than a rigid one-way timeline.
Yes, every project benefits from some level of user research.
Without it, you’re relying on assumptions instead of facts, which is one of the most common reasons software fails. Even lightweight research, like a few interviews or surveys, can reveal insights that change your priorities and save you from costly mistakes later.
The depth of research depends on your project.
For a small MVP, you might only need a handful of user interviews and competitor analysis to validate your direction.
For enterprise software with multiple user types, you’ll likely need deeper research — mapping out roles, workflows, and organizational constraints.
The key is grounding all of your decisions in real user needs, no matter your project’s size.
The “right” framework depends on your project goals, timeline, and constraints.
Here’s how to think about it:
Design Thinking is a good fit for broad, complex challenges. It’s flexible and helps you explore multiple possibilities before narrowing down solutions.
User-Centered Design (UCD) works best if user adoption is critical. It keeps users involved at every stage so you know every feature solves a real problem.
Lean UX is ideal for projects where requirements change quickly. It focuses on testing ideas early and often instead of producing heavy documentation.
Agile UX integrates design directly into sprints, which makes it a strong choice if you’re already using Agile development.
Double Diamond is helpful when you need to balance exploration with delivery. It emphasizes defining the right problem before building the solution.
The reality is that most projects use a mix of these frameworks.
The important part is to stay flexible and adapt methods to your context rather than rigidly following one framework from start to finish.
Want to create software people actually enjoy using?
That’s where we come in.
We’re a team of 80+ engineers, designers, and product specialists who care about more than just shipping features – we care about how real people experience them.
Over the years, we’ve worked with a wide range of companies from diverse industries to design and build reliable, user-centric software.
If you’re looking for a partner to help you do the same, let’s talk. We’d love to hear about your project.
Ivan is truly passionate about what he does. In his role as Lead Product Manager, his strength is shaping products that not only meet market needs but also wow their users. And with over a decade of experience at software companies and startups, he knows all the ins and outs of building successful products.
In his spare time, he enjoys staying active, whether it's hitting the gym, playing sports, or hiking. His dream office? A terrace in Komiža on the island of Vis, taking in the warm Adriatic sun.
