Hey there!
Building a website, an app or a functionality is not as simple as eating a chocolate and cream waffle. But it is an exciting and rewarding process for the entire product team.
Let me share the product roadmap I have learnt according to my own experience over the last 14 years when building tech products:
Step 1 - Scope and discussion:
Before starting any technical action, it is important to talk about the project, the bases and the requirements. At this point, we have to create an initial specification document related to the design.
Step 2 - MVP definition:
With all the above information, a minimally optimal version of the product can be defined to put it in the hands of users in the shortest possible time.
Step 3 - Wireframing production (UX):
The entire user experience is designed and the first interactive prototype is generated.
Step 4 - UX discussions with the design team, product managers, developers and real users:
This experience is discussed as much as possible with the agents involved, quickly and efficiently, and the conclusions are implemented to obtain a final UX agreed upon with real users.
Step 5 - Final design production (UI):
Having the definitive UX, the final design of the interface is prepared. Before doing so, it is important to have defined a style guide that is consistent with the company's branding guidelines.
Step 6 - UI discussions with real users:
As with the UX, before having the final design, it is important to discuss it with the agents involved. Two rounds of feedback at most is optimal.
Step 7 - Dev specs document:
Once we have the final UX/UI, we can enable the specifications for the developers, so that they can have the style guide, distances, measurements, sizes, fonts, colors, assets... along with the front-end and back-end functionalities required to bring the project into life.
Step 8 - Development:
The design team is always alert during the development phase to quickly support everything that is necessary, provide them with new requirements that may arise and help correct possible errors that have been overlooked in the previous phases.
Step 9 - First quality testing:
After the developers themselves, the participants in the UX/UI design have to do the first serious testing to ensure quality control of the MVP.
Step 10 - Drivers:
With few, but qualified users (5 maximum and getting their consent first), the pilots are launched, which is the real product working and errors and successes are analysed.
Step 11 - Release:
Product Launch.
Step 12 - Monitoring and A/B Tests:
On a daily basis, real user sessions are monitored to discover blockages, frustrations, bugs, UX or UI failures... and they are analysed weekly, taking actions to fix the detected issues.
Similarly, no UX or UI design should be implemented without having previously validated it through an experiment (A/B Test), which should last at least two weeks.
And that’s essentially, how we built our Guestapp at Chekin that has been used by more than 4 million guests.
If you like to take a look to my portfolio, click here.
Thanks for reading!