Kicking off a new project is as much about communicating with the client and understanding their goals and product strategy, as it is their customers needs. I am always keen to identify the opportunities for a client's new product. Every project is different but this can include organising a workshop, inviting key business stakeholders, creating a UX canvas to outline the project and creating a journey map to prioritise key deliverables and timings.
Competitive benchmarking, customer analysis through creation of personas are just some of the ways to research the market and customer needs. Concepting and user experience form part of the design phase.
According to the scale of the project, this can involve conducting user research, customer journey mapping, wireframes, early sketches and designs, prototyping and testing.
On then to the visual design where I create branding, visuals aesthetics, user interfaces, key layouts, colour palette and initial style guide direction. If required, for larger, more complex projects such as at Virgin Holidays, I helped create a design system from the ground up. From here, hi-fidelity prototypes, menus and general functionality of the product can be created. A project, even when complete always needs monitoring. Analysing the new product to see how it's performing, listening to user feedback and iterating changes as and when required are essential.