Creating something new is challenging, no matter how much experience you have. The design and development process is where many projects break down. Developing a product is an iterative process with many checkpoints along the way to ensure that your finished product meets your expectations and the expectations of your target audience. Every project takes careful planning, attention to detail, and a lot of hard work. But with the right planning and preparation, you can increase the likelihood that your product will be a success.

We have been using this process at NFN Labs for the last 11 years and it has worked well for us. This blog post details how to make sure your design and development process succeeds – so you can get back to focusing on what matters: creating something amazing for your customers.

Ask yourself the right questions

It’s a good idea to start by asking yourself a few key questions before diving straight into the design and development process. These questions will help you lay the foundation for your project, and can be applied to any situation, regardless of the type of product you’re creating. - What are you trying to achieve? - What problems are you trying to solve? - What is your target market? - Who will use your product? - What do you want your product to do for your customers? - What are the benefits of your product? - Who do you want to exclude from using your product? - What key features and functionality do you want to include in your product?

Define your product requirements

For each question, you’ll need to clarify the details behind each requirement. We call this phase 'User experience definition'.

If you’re working on a new product or application, start by creating a product requirements document (PRD). This will help you record everything you need to know about your project before you jump into the design and development process. If you’re working on a redesign of an existing product, you can use the PRD to capture your design requirements. A PRD is a great way to document everything you think you’ll need to know in order to create a successful product design.

In this phase, we are trying to understand all the unknowns. Who are the users of the system, what are their roles and responsibilities? How do they navigate most effectively in the system we are building? We do this by building broad user journeys and mindmaps.

Conduct user research

The best way to understand your customers is to talk to them. As you’re developing your product requirements, you’ll want to research your customers’ behaviours, needs, and expectations. This will help you create a product that is tailored to your audience – and it will make your product more successful. We also capture all ideas and areas of interests in something called a moodboard. This helps to align all stakeholders to the big picture and narrow down to a direction we all agree with.

With this information we define wireframes, detailed workflows (connections of wireframes) and a style guide. The style guide defines the overall style in terms of the color palette, typography and iconography and brings consistency throughout the product across different touch points like the website, apps, email, social media etc.

These phases of understanding user journeys, user research and moodboards, wireframes, detailed workflows and the style guide together from the foundation of the product.