What is a UX and UI workflow?
Each designer’s UX and UI workflow can vary depending on their personal style, the design team they’re a part of, or even the specific project that is assigned to them. For the purpose of this article, consider the following as a UX and UI workflow: brainstorming, research, low-fi design, testing, high-fi design, and prototyping.

Here’s what is involved for each of these phases:

Brainstorming: This can be both a fun and daunting stage for designers, depending on how familiar they are with the project details assigned to them. It is the phase where you start from nothing and collaborate with team members to generate a list of ideas for how to best tackle the problem that you are meant to solve.

Research: As UX designers, you have to ensure that research is consistently happening alongside design for a human-centered perspective. The research phase is where it all begins: where you outline your research plan and discuss what user research needs to be done prior to any actual design work. When done right, effective user research can dramatically decrease your production time while increasing the chances that your design is solving the right problem.

Low-fidelity design: There is no one right way to do low-fidelity design; it really comes down to the preferences of the designers themselves. However, there is one rule to designing in low-fidelity, and that is to make it quick and dirty. This can mean sketches on napkins, notebooks, and whiteboards, or even working digitally with Adobe XD. The important thing about this phase is to not spend copious amounts of time making the design look pretty but rather, drilling down to the fundamental concept or functionality of the design, thus decreasing the amount of time it takes to iterate.

Testing: Once a low-fidelity design is completed, it is time to get feedback. This phase involves scheduling testing sessions with your users to see how they may use your product designs. You also want to ensure that you are actually solving the problem and addressing the pain points they are experiencing. Some forms of user testing to explore are heat mapping and usability testing.

High-fidelity design: This is where you make your designs look nice and polished. It’s also the type of design that can be utilized for a second round of user testing since it often contains interactive elements that give a broader scope of the user experience. UX designers use design psychology to further amplify designs in this phase and to create an improved the user experience based on previous feedback and testing. It’s in this phase that we solidify and evaluate our design’s success.

Prototyping: The final step in the UX and UI workflow is to prototype designs, coordinate and sync your screens, and make it all clickable in order to either conduct further user testing or hand it off to the development team. The goal in prototyping is to ensure that your are building products using human-computer interaction (HCI) methods. This way, you can make sure that designs are improving the user experience and not hampering it.