12 Days of UXmas: Day 12—Iterate, and take stock

On the twelfth day of UXmas, Designlab sent to me... congratulations on completing all the challenges!

It’s Day 12, and time to take down your UXmas decorations. There’s one final challenge before we say sayonara. But before we get onto that, let’s take stock of what we’ve worked on so far:

• We came up with an idea for a product and researched the market
• We conducted user research
• We analysed user research data with an affinity diagram
• We created user personas
• We set out user scenarios
• We wrote some point-of-view and how-might-we statements
• We brainstormed product design ideas
• We devised a sitemap and user flow
• We sketched out our product
• We made a prototype
• We conducted user testing

So, to our final challenge. After yesterday’s user testing, It’s crucial that we now analyse the information we gathered, and use it to drive improvements to the design of our product. A robust UX design process should include several cycles of prototyping and user testing. Even after the product is launched, we can continue gathering feedback from a bigger pool of users, and keep refining the product experience to make sure it works.

	5 minute challenge:  With yesterday’s user testing feedback in mind, iterate on your prototype, changing your design where necessary to better meet user needs.
	30 minute challenge:  Using the methods from Day 3, analyse your user testing data and create a new affinity diagram. Then, iterate on your prototype, changing your design where necessary to better meet user needs.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this series of challenges! After you’ve iterated on your design, you will have completed a user experience design process in miniature. Even if you found some days difficult or rushed, we hope that you’ve gained an outline understanding of what UX designers do. soon.

Thanks to everyone who has emailed us to share their ideas and progress over the past two weeks. We’re still working through your projects – if you’ve not had a reply from us yet, we’ll be in touch real soon.

And if you’ve not yet shared your work, why not let us know how you’ve been getting on? Feel free to package up your UXmas project and drop us an email at hello@trydesignlab.com, or send us a tweet @trydesignlab.

Thanks for taking part!

Remember, sometimes the right solution for the user isn’t the one you first planned. With that in mind, we’d be really grateful for feedback on your UXmas experience via this 2-question survey. Your responses will help us to improve similar email series that we offer in the future.

More UXmas challenges

• Day 1 – Choose a Project
• Day 2 – Make a Research Plan
• Day 3 – Create an Affinity Diagram
• Day 4 – Outline Some User Personas
• Day 5 – Map Out Scenarios
• Day 6 – Point of View Statements & How-Might-We Questions
• Day 7 – Brainstorming
• Day 8 – Sitemap & User Flow
• Day 9 – Sketching
• Day 10 – Prototyping
• Day 11 – User Testing
• Day 12 – Iterate, and take stock