Visual Analytics Design Process
This repository is a collection of documents intended to guide the design process at Axis Group. It contains guidelines that should not be followed exactly. Each design process should be tailored to the individual project or design engagement. This document intends to provide a walkthrough of each step in our design process and approaches to create artifacts in each phase.
- Pre-Engagement Phase
- Understand Phase
- Define Phase
- Diverge Phase
- Converge Phase
- Prototype Phase
- Validate Phase
- Design Implementation Support Phase
What is a design engagement?
Axis design engagement brings UX design and data visualization principles to BI projects to produce design specs for highly usable, useful, and desirable data applications that support business decisions.
Why do a design engagement?
Most clients have a good understanding of their business objectives and their data systems. However, they don't know how to map their data to their business objectives with visual analytics that efficiently drive results. This results in low-value applications that are rejected by users.
Our goal is to clarify a vision for a data app and then translate that vision into a highly usable design that can be implemented, ensuring that clients get their app builds right the first time.
What should you expect to have at the end of a design sprint?
At the end of the design engagement, the team will understand the problem and will have validated whether we have a viable solution to begin building or whether we need to keep searching for a solution. Design engagement helps channel efforts towards building a solution that enhances usability and user experience of interacting with the solution, while achieving the business goal.
Design Engagement Overview
The Design process at Axis Group is divided into six phases: Understand, Define, Diverge, Decide, Prototype, and Validate.
Pre-Engagement
Typically, this phase would require performing research on the client and their industry. The pre-engagement phase should be utilized mainly to formulate a common ground of the ‘job to be done.’ The problem could evolve over further discussions, but it should be agreed upon by the entire team. This should serve as a starting point for discussions with the client.
Understand
The first phase of the design sprint is about gathering existing information on the business, the users, and their goals. We typically talk to users and stakeholders during this phase to understand their business processes, goals, responsibilities, decisions, and actions. We also expose risky knowledge gaps and assumptions so we can make plans to reduce those risks and move forward with confidence.
Define
The define phase focuses on consolidating what we learnt from the understand phase and defining personas for the application. This serves as a reference point for further discussions and design decisions. This phase helps further define the scope and vision for the project with users and stakeholders.
Diverge
The Diverge phase generates insights and concepts for solutions. Our goal is to explore as many possibilities as possible, with considerations of effort to build. Insights are born from this explosion of possibilities by considering the implications of radically different approaches to solving a problem. These insights can become valuable differentiating forces and the source of inspiration for unique solutions.
Converge
During the Converge phase we take all the concepts generated in the diverge phase, group them into logical and meaningful categories, and then evaluate and prioritize them both within the design team and with the client. By exploring and eliminating many options, we have reason to be more confident in our design decisions.
Prototype
High fidelity mockups that closely represent what the final solution will look like are created in the prototype phase. These high fidelity mockups are created based on concepts from the diverge and converge phases. Sketch, InVision, and Qlik Sense are all valid mediums.
Validate
The purpose of the validate phase is to receive feedback on high fidelity mockups from users and stakeholders. Iterations are made to the mockups based on the feedback received. A design engagement might have multiple rounds of iteration depending on the time frame of the project.
Design Implementation Support
The Design Implementation Support phase encompasses all efforts towards supporting development
once the design prototype is approved by the client.
This might entail continued oversight on development and ensuring that the development is as per specifications.
In addition to availability to support and answer any questions or concerns faced during development,
any documentation required to turn over development responsibilities to internal teams shall be created in this phase.
Design Process Checklist
This checklist includes all the methods in all phases that could be applied in the current design process. Some tasks are marked "Required" which means they are essential to the success of the engagement and should take priority.
Design Resources
In this folder you can find useful resources, including design resources that are created by Axis team, design method collections, and useful online tools. We will keep updating this folder as we discover more useful resources in the future.
Frequently Asked Questions
We will collect and answer questions in detail in the Issue section.
Contributing
We welcome anyone to contribute to this design process documentation, and here's how you can start.
License
Copyright © 2017 Axis Group, llc. The information contained in this document is free, and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the license.