Design planning promotes consistency, scalability, and efficiency throughout the design process, resulting in a higher-quality end product and a more satisfying user experience.
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Design planning is a strategic project planning process of outlining and organizing the design approach for a digital product. It sets the foundation for effective collaboration, efficient execution, and successful outcomes in the product development journey.
Design planning involves, but is not limited to:
Design planning is crucial in digital product development as it provides a roadmap for the design team. It ensures that design decisions align with user needs, business goals, and brand identity.
Effective design planning helps streamline the product design process by conducting thorough research, defining clear goals, and establishing guidelines to reduce ambiguity and minimize rework. It enables effective communication among team members, facilitates stakeholder alignment, and increases the chances of creating a user-centered, visually appealing, and functional digital product.
Someone from the design team is typically responsible for creating the design plan. The individual varies depending on the organization and org structure. Some common examples include:
While the design team is responsible for creating and executing the design plan, it’s a collaborative effort involving multiple teams and stakeholders to align user needs with business goals and objectives.
In a recent webinar hosted by UXPin titled Strategies for Building a Resilient DesignOps Practice, experts Salomé Mortazavi, Meredith Black, and Adam Fry-Pierce discussed the importance of aligning design efforts with business strategies. The panelists shared insights on the challenges design teams face and how DesignOps can address these challenges.
Salomé Mortazavi, Senior Director of DesignOps and Design Systems at SiriusXM, highlighted that a common root cause of challenges faced by design teams is the lack of alignment and understanding of Design’s role within the overall business strategy. Salomé emphasizes the importance of creating a shared vision and aligning the design and business charter.
Meredith Black, a DesignOps consultant, added that design teams often face bottlenecks and inefficiencies due to fragmented processes, communication gaps, and resource constraints.
Meredith stresses that DesignOps can streamline workflows, create design systems, and foster collaboration across teams, which helps in moving forward with deliverables.
The panelists also discussed the significance of planning and vision-setting in aligning design efforts. Salomé shared that her go-to tool for planning is aligning roadmaps around a maturity model she calls the Design Maturity Index. This strategy involves continuous planning throughout the year to ensure design efforts align with business objectives.
The following high-level design planning framework provides a step-by-step process to create a comprehensive plan for digital product development.
The first step is understanding the problem and target audience. Design frameworks like design thinking, double diamond, Agile UX, and others help designers research and plan projects with a user-centered mindset. To understand the problem, design teams will:
Design systems are valuable in design planning as they provide a comprehensive framework for establishing design principles and guidelines. A design system will simplify or mitigate having to set principles and guidelines for every project.
Design principles serve as guiding statements that inform the overall approach to design. They outline the fundamental values and goals teams must include in the product’s design. Defining design principles helps maintain consistency, coherence, and a user-centric focus throughout the design process.
Usability guidelines establish standards and best practices that ensure the product is easy to use and provides a positive user experience. These guidelines cover navigation, layout, content organization, and interaction design. Setting usability guidelines helps create a consistent and intuitive user interface that meets user expectations and needs.
Brand guidelines and visual identity elements define the visual representation of the product and ensure consistency with the organization’s brand, including typography, color palette, logo usage, and imagery style. Incorporating brand guidelines and visual identity elements into the design planning process helps maintain a cohesive and recognizable brand presence across the product.
Designers can establish a solid information architecture that ensures a logical and intuitive user experience, making it easier for users to find and navigate through the content and features of the digital product.
Begin by reviewing and analyzing the existing content within the app or website by identifying all the relevant information, assessing its relevance and quality, and determining what to keep, revise, and remove.
Organize the information into a clear and logical structure by grouping related content, creating categories and hierarchies, and establishing a coherent flow of information for users to navigate.
Mapping user flows allows you to identify the most intuitive and efficient ways for users to achieve their goals. Navigation maps, on the other hand, visually represent the structure of the website or application, showing how different pages or sections are connected.
Wireframes serve as a blueprint for the final design and focus on the arrangement of content, functionality, and user interactions. Low-fidelity prototypes allow for user testing and feedback before investing significant resources into high-fidelity prototypes.
A product’s interaction design must facilitate smooth and engaging user experiences, enabling users to navigate and interact with the digital product seamlessly.
Map the product’s interactions and actions to understand user goals, define user journeys, and identify touchpoints where users engage with the interface.
Create intuitive, user-friendly interfaces by designing clear navigation, logically organizing content, and ensuring the UI elements are consistent and visually appealing.
Interaction design includes designing buttons, menus, forms, and other interactive components that respond to user input. Microinteractions, such as hover effects or animated transitions, can add subtle but meaningful feedback to user actions.
The design plan must guide designers in creating visually appealing and cohesive designs that align with the product’s brand and effectively communicate its purpose and message to the users.
As we discovered from our DesignOps experts above, collaboration and incorporating stakeholder feedback are crucial for design planning. Establishing effective communication channels, collaborating with stakeholders and cross-functional teams, and conducting design reviews and feedback sessions, facilitates knowledge sharing to align the design plan with business goals.
Collaboration and communication considerations for the design plan include:
Effective project and timeline management are essential for keeping design initiatives on track, optimizing resource utilization, and ensuring timely delivery of design outputs.
UXPin Merge bridges the gap between design and development to simplify design planning and product development. With design and engineering teams in sync, DesignOps can spend more time on strategic initiatives rather than wasting resources on redundant processes–like updating multiple design libraries and documentation.
With a real single source of truth, the design system team syncs updates to every team with one release–no more separate design libraries for designers, developers, prototyping, etc. Teams can access UI components and documentation from one centralized repository, resulting in absolute consistency, zero design drift, and minimal technical debt.
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