Planning:

• Meet with stakeholders to review roadmap, strategy, metrics / analytics & past user feedback / needs.
• Set measurable goals & accountability for designs & the live release. Track any applicable metrics.
• Plan 1 to 2 weeks sprints, depending on the focus.

Sprint Prep:

• Talk to stakeholders & product / customer facing team to understand the problem we're trying to solve & our current assumptions to be tested.
• Create Asana tickets for upcoming design tasks.

Research Phase:

User Research:

• Review user feature requests & feedback related to the sprint.
• Talk with users about their problems & needs.
• Send out surveys.

Inspiration & Accepted Patterns Research:

• Review existing research & studies.
• Search for similar products or solutions.
• Search for established user patterns.
• Create an inspiration mood board.

Design Phase:

• Pair Design - I find smaller groups of 2-3 people to be the ideal size for productive & creative solutions. I meet with teammates from various departments for 30 min to 2 hour sessions throughout the week. Each session iterates on a previous teammate's concepts, as well as brainstorms new solutions.
• User Design Sessions - I invite users to partake in pair design style sessions as well. This is often exciting for them, to feel as though they are able to directly contribute to the evolution of the product. It also often generates great ideas from user feedback. 
• Create user stories & personas.
• Create user flows / site map.
• Sketch concepts.
• Create wireframes / mockups / clickable prototypes.
• Review existing style guide or design system for re-useable components.

User Testing:

• This phase begins in the "Design Phase" & continues throughout concurrently, to either validate or invalidate, with user feedback & observation, the educated / research based assumptions & solutions that we made.
  
• Enter all findings into a table or tool (such as AirTable) to find applicable trends, measure weight of feedback / user type. As well as being an adjunct source of feedback / ideas for design decisions, in conjunction with feedback / request sorting repositories like ProductBoard.

Methods:

• Prototype based a/b tests
• Discussions
• Live observation
• Community message board posts 
• Surveys

Team Feedback:

• This stage entails getting final team feedback, prior to hand off (via tools like Slack, Wake or having in person meetings to conduct a design review).
• If product owner or stakeholder approval is required prior to hand off, this is the time to get it.

Iterate / High Fidelity:

• Throughout the "Design Phase", "User Testing" & "Team Feedback" phases, there will be continuous, iterations, tweaks & changes taking place. However, setting aside a dedicated time after all of the feedback, to synthesis all the feedback & iterate concepts, is very useful.
• Designs that are in the wireframe stage or even sticky note sketch phase can be handed off to development, prior to high fidelity mockups (if they are ready for it in their sprint).

Hand Off:

• Help dev set up A/B test experiments in Google Optimize, when needed.

Break up designs into smaller component tickets:

• Highlight areas of each larger design to show visually what is being handed off
• Add relevant screen shots / prototype link to ticket
• Add assets
• Add directions & specs
• Add any relevant user stories & personas
• Move ticket to the appropriate position in the Backlog, based on roadmap & urgency

Post-Design / Hand Off:

• Add new concepts or patterns to the existing design system or style guide repo.
• Add designs to a master prototype, if needed the company needs a consistently up to date single point of truth prototype (for sales teams, fundraising, etc). As opposed to non-connected feature or sprint based prototypes.

Live Product User Testing:

• Conduct ongoing user testing on the actual released product, to find pain points, user frustrations & needs.
• Continue to test out prior design assumptions, for areas of improvement, despite already passing through to development & release.
• Create notes & tickets for any iterations needed, to be conducted in upcoming sprints.

QA / Pixel & Experience Accountability:

• QA the release for design errors, pixel imperfections & incorrectly implemented UX or user flows. 
• Create tickets for anything that is found, keeping in mind whether or not higher priority items should be placed ahead of it in the backlog.

Review Metrics & Analytics:

• Follow up on the measurable design goals that had been set for each sprint or feature. 
  
• Review any A/B test experiments for a clear winner & whether further tests are warranted or if larger priority tasks should be given full focus.
• Look for metrics that indicate broken user funnels, ineffective onboarding, user confusion / drop off...the primary focus (unless otherwise stated by the stakeholders) is measuring Usability, Engagement & Conversion.
• Gather data, along with insights from user testing & user feedback conducted over the past sprint & prep it for the upcoming sprint planning session.