UX Design Methods & Deliverables

UX Collective Editors
UX Collective
Published in
17 min readApr 30, 2016

What does a User Experience Designer do from 9 to 5? Well, a lot of stuff. The list below aggregates most common methods and deliverables produced by UX Designers as they craft amazing experiences for other people.

For each item on the list you’ll see additional links with some of the best practices available in the industry. Don’t take it for granted, though. Being able to reshape these methods on the go is a pretty persistent ability in some of the best UX Designers we know.

Design Strategy Methods:

Ecosystem Map

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:

Competitive Audit

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:

Storyboards

A comic strip that illustrates the series of actions that consumers need to 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:

Task Analysis

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:

Features Roadmap

A product’s evolution plan with prioritized features. It could be a spreadsheet, a diagram or even a bunch of sticky notes. Shares the product strategy with the team and the road that needs to be taken to achieve its vision.

Related links:

Use Cases and Scenarios

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:

This list was created by Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga. We hope you find it helpful and share it with your UX friends.

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Responses (32)

What are your thoughts?

Great post, this also serves as a great refresher, looking forward to reading more of your content and utilizing the related links!

I’m having a hard time with this list seeing as how focus groups made the list and user research did NOT! Ask any UX designer out there and they will probably say that user research (talking to users one on one, one by one) is way more effective than conducting a focus group.

Can you explain the difference between a Consumer Journey Map and User Flow?