Your comprehensive guide to the tools, methods, and magic that designers wield!
By Fabricio Teixeira | 12 min read · Jan 18, 2021
Get ready to dive deep into the most common tools, methods, processes, and deliverables that designers use to create the digital awesomeness you love!
This is an updated version of a list published a few years ago. It's better than ever!
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
Pre-stabilished criteria to measure progress toward strategic goals or the maintenance of operational goals. KPIs help inform design decisions along the way and are an indispensable tool to measure the impact of your design efforts.
Related links:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
A Design Sprint is a unique five-day process for validating ideas and solving big challenges through prototyping and testing ideas with customers.
Related links:
Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter, check out our starting guide to UX, and follow us on Twitter and Linkedin.
Your visitors since 1998: 
Quick Links:
Home
About Me
Email Me!
Sign my Guestbook!
Best viewed with Netscape Navigator!
This section is still being coded. Check back soon!
You've reached the ultimate UX Design resource on the web!
Proudly hosted by GeoCities!
UX Design Planet!
