What makes a great product experience? As it turns out, there’s no single way to design an excellent user experience (UX).

But UX designers typically go through many of the same steps in their work, and by learning about these stages of the UX design process, you can gain insight into how the process works, as well as how to better communicate with your designer to craft an intuitive and impactful product. Let’s take a look at this process together, step-by-step.

Define

When it comes to a complex process like user experience design, planning is everything. The first step in designing an experience for any customer or end-user is to define just what that experience will look like. You need to understand who you’re designing for, what their specific needs are and how your product or service can fit into their lives. Defining is more than simply jotting down bullet points on a piece of paper; it requires research, organization and careful consideration of both opportunity costs and competitive advantages. No matter what kind of product or service you intend to offer users, defining your target audience is key—and doing so before diving into other aspects of UX design will help ensure that all subsequent stages run smoothly.‍

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‍Create

It’s easy to think of creating as coming up with a product idea and drawing some mockups. It’s not. Creating is iterative, recursive and has many stages; it goes well beyond merely coming up with an idea. For example, you have to conduct user research and testing to uncover problems that need solving in your target market. Understanding what your customers do—and don’t do—is a crucial part of creating great products.

Side note: Start by reading Steve Krug’s excellent book Don’t Make Me Think.

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Validate

Begin by testing your ideas with users. How you do that will depend on what stage of design you’re at. If you’re still in wireframing or sketching phases, create an affinity diagram to capture insights from users and stakeholders. If you’re farther along and have a low-fidelity prototype ready for testing, try an unmoderated usability test or a card sort. If people don’t understand what it is you’re trying to do, it might be a sign that you have more research to do.

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Prototype

Once you’ve nailed down your target users and their needs, it’s time to figure out how to meet those needs with a product. This phase of design is all about mockups and prototypes—and figuring out which ones make sense. If you’re designing an app or other digital product, it may be helpful to sketch screens in a program like Sketch, Figma, InVision, Photoshop or Illustrator. Prototyping serves many purposes: It helps clarify project scope and gets you closer to nailing down your aesthetic vision for a product.

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Test

Next up is testing. Here's where you actually do some research on users' needs, collect and analyze data, write wireframes and design mockups, create a user flow—whatever it takes to make your idea into something tangible. If at any point in your process you find that you don't have an answer to one of your known unknowns (aka questions) from earlier on in your process, go back and revisit those steps until everything makes sense—this is particularly important for research-heavy processes like customer development interviews or usability testing.

Conduct user research and develop prototypes to test usability. The time spent on testing will be invaluable. For every potential issue you identify early on, there’s one less that you have to fix later—and it’s all saved money and stress. Plus, with each iteration of your product or service (which is part of most UX design processes), your users are getting closer to an optimal solution for their needs—that means a better product for them and a more successful company for you. And what could be better than that?

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Implement

The design implementation process occurs once designers have completed their research and created a final mockup of how they want a design to look. At that point, they create an interactive prototype so others can see what they’ve envisioned. In addition to creating beautiful visual designs and well-crafted interactive elements, great user experience designers are also responsible for thoroughly documenting their work with both clients and fellow colleagues. This means being able to explain complex ideas with ease – taking something as multifaceted as a UI/UX design process, explaining it briefly in layman terms and providing examples or even scenarios of when one approach would be more suitable than another.

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Repeat

After you’ve designed your product—the functionality and interface, in other words—and you know what it does and how it does it, your next step is to repeat. A lot. There are always flaws that creep up when you revisit your design, so be sure to jump back into Sketch or InVision every once in a while. And if there’s time before launch? Repeat some more. Nothing wrong with going over everything a third time just before putting it out into the world. The less imperfection you have at launch, after all, means less support you need from users; that translates into happier customers and even better word-of-mouth than ever before!