Develop personas
A persona is a qualitative description of a visitor to your website. It’s a model that describes the needs and reservations of your targeted customer with some context of their perceived behavior.

Some areas that you might want to think about when designing your prototype is:
- What are the business-critical behaviors that personalization efforts will accelerate?
- Motivational factors that drive your users to complete an action.
- Brand loyalty and a level of familiarity with the product, service or website that a user would do to complete a transaction.
- Are there any barriers or hesitations that would prevent a user from using the service you’re providing?

Target different attributes
Behavioral attributes can be divided into categories of current and past behavior. If you’re creating wires for a site, you may look at why a certain segment of users who abandoned the shopping cart before they completed the transaction process. You may base your design decisions on the needs of customers who exhibited near-conversion behavior.

Contextual attributes help describe the environment that your users are responding to. A user may have a preference to browse a website from their mobile phone. Then a design with a quick call-to-action with a phone number might be appropriate. Whatever UX decisions you make, it needs to be logical to the environment that your users are operating within.

Understanding the demographics is another attribute that you need to be mindful of when creating personalized experiences. Demographic data can be particularly useful in determining if it will be highly actionable. Everything from location, age, gender and income play a big part in developing a customizable experience.

Plan experiences and start prototyping
Once you discovered all the elements that can make up a personalization strategy, you’ll need to look at how to execute this experience. The discovery process has allowed you to collect all of your data and make assumptions on how you would tailor an experience for each user group.

The next step is to understand how the value proposition resonates with the audience. Have you addressed all of their needs? Personas and historical data should inform prototype ideation. Map out the experiences and have a few options. The prototyping process gives an opportunity to try new things and allows you to be inventive at the same time. From there you’ll be on your way to creating a well-honed personalization strategy.

Establish a prototyping process
Research and strategy should be worked out first before designing your prototype. Hopefully, you’ve worked on the initial information architecture at this stage and have established what are the vital user needs.
Start to evaluate the elements that will help you create an ideal prototype for your site or product. The client brief, business requirements, usability tests, personas, competitor analysis, site map and user journeys play a significant role in this process.
There are several different prototyping techniques that can be applied. For instance, content-driven websites will require a separate focus where information and navigation design need to be clearly shown in the wireframes. This will enable you to demonstrate to a user how the information will be consumed opposed to how a product’s feature will function.

Combine those ideas
The prototype solution doesn’t have to be developed in a linear fashion. The goal for any UX professional is to assess and combine the ideas about site navigation, information architecture, and design, then ensure that it meets the overall business objectives and user needs.
Sketching your ideas before you start using an online prototyping tool will help you formulate those ideas quickly. This process is encouraged because it allows the designer to focus on the key elements and will provide a sense of direction for the project.
If you’re in a team environment, this method will allow other members to be included in the creative decision-making process. As a group, you can start thinking about what type of experience you want to create for the users. This paper and pen process can include tools such as flip charts, index cards, scissors, whiteboards, and Post-It notes. Whatever you choose, it’s important to get those ideas together and start formulating solutions.

Wireframe projects
For projects that require more consideration, the process of wireframing with an online tool will take those early sketches to a greater level of detail. This requires pulling in all your research, workshop notes, strategy, user feedback, and content ideas into a representable, bare bones format.
The wireframes don’t have to resemble the final product, however, the focus should be on how you want to position the basic features on a page and demonstrate that you’ve thought about the logical steps that a user would take if they were interacting with the site or product.

Client feedback is essential
Once your wireframes are ready for presentation, you’ll need to think about the audience that you’ll be showing them to. This is an important step in the client-facing process. At this stage, it’s important that you are organized with your documentation, as you’ll want to ensure that your changes and adaptations stay consistent.
Before showing the wires to your clients, it’s important to elaborate on the purpose of how the features and greyscale illustrations are laid out. Your stakeholders may not be used to viewing wireframes, so they’ll need you to guide them through the process. Reassure them that these wires don’t represent the final layout and that the purpose of this feedback is to encourage a group discussion.

Annotating wireframes
As you continue with the wireframe process, it’s important that you keep track of the changes and that they’re well documented and are traceable to previous discussions had. You’ll need to be in a position where you can communicate these decisions with absolute clarity and objectivity.
Annotations should be on the same page as the wireframes. This will help with its readability and interpretation of what the prototype is trying to achieve. The ability to eliminate ambiguity is critical. Ensure that the annotations are clearly labeled and that they support the design goals of the project.

Prototyping Success
If you take a look at some of the techniques above, it’s hard to believe the concept of developing a perfect prototype exists. The process can include some or all of these elements:

• Research client brief, business requirements, personas and competition
• Combine ideas from team members and project teams
• Sketch out ideas and develop wireframes, create solutions
• Present to the client and incorporate feedback
• Document changes and clearly annotate wires

The ideal prototyping strategy should be fluid and non-linear. With so many variables, it’s impossible to design a perfect prototype. However, if you establish a solid prototyping process by incorporating the tips above, you will find yourself on a good way to improve your wireframing process.

The hype about big data isn’t going to die down. Designing smarter, customer-centric experiences is becoming a basic requirement for developing a sophisticated product or service. This evolution calls for valuable insights, data analytics, and research to inform strategic design decisions.

Rather than going with a look and feel scenario, UX professionals are being asked to dig deeper and utilize that data to inform design decisions. The shift in the industry is moving away from only getting by with visual design. Data-driven experiences are becoming the norm and the need to create experiences that resonate with a user’s pattern of behavior is becoming a priority.

What is big data?

Big data is known as a collection of data that can come from sources that can be inside and outside a company. This type of information is continually being fed into organizations daily and it becomes a source for ongoing findings and analysis.

Regular data is now becoming big data because it becomes large enough that it’s no longer easily processed by standard methods. With this surge in volume, spreadsheets become useless and processing data becomes difficult because it lacks the flexibility and the scalability to handle large quantities of information.

However, once that information is processed, that big data set becomes very valuable. It can highlight some key metrics, which allows you to develop a tailor-made solution for a user.

Making sense of this data is critical to the design, as it creates valuable insights that rely on having some context in mind. Without this context of the data, you’ll end up making generalized conclusions that won’t serve any purpose for the experience you’re trying to achieve.

Why is this relevant to my design?

How is this relevant to creating better products and experiences? Big data allows us to expand our knowledge of what a customer wants. It also gives us an opportunity to develop products and services that are better suited to a customer’s needs.

This type of data gives a deeper understanding of how customers behave and it allows a connection to them on a more meaningful level. It enhances the marketing activities by allowing analysis of customer behavior through multiple channels and gives an indication of whether the customer would most likely buy your products or services.

How it informs design strategy

It’s smart to use data from a variety of source to inform your design. Whether it’s web analytics, A/B tests, social media sentiment, customer surveys, sales data, stakeholder interviews, usability tests, or industry reports, all are valuable in developing an experience that’s engaging to your customer.

Combining quantitative and qualitative research is a good approach as it ties in numerical insights with perceived behavioral characteristics. This approach will tell the real story of what needs to be designed.

Web analytics can’t tell us everything that we need to know about a user’s behavior. The same can be said about usability tests. Big data is about variety and that means using multiple datasets. It creates a complete picture of how to produce designs and encourages users to engage and perform an action.

All data is important

Whether the data is big or small, it’s not flawless. You should easily find limitations and bias in every type of data that you evaluate. Good data always describes its biases and will provide some context of its limitations.

When developing your prototypes or wires with an online tool, make sure you’ve assessed your data sources before jumping in and starting to design your product. Even if the data isn’t relevant, that information is critical for you to know what to discount when building out your design.

Using data is about making iterations, creating improvements, and discovering new opportunities to engage with your users. This is a way to figure out the story of real people using your products and utilizing that data to create an experience that suits and meets all of their needs.