Before I start going crazy with designing I ask myself or my teammates a few questions.
What is the context of how this product will be used? Who will be using this? When will they be using this? Why will they be using it? Who is "they", anyway? Why are we here?
After asking myself some philosophical questions I start looking for information that can help drive our design decisions.
Some competitive analysis, persona making, and journey mapping. Now that we have an idea of the who, why, and when its time to dive deeper into those to fully understand what I'm designing. I basically try to become a mini expert in what I'm designing for before I start creating the UI.
Whether it's with a whiteboard drawing ideas and erasing them to make room for new ones or making a quick clickable prototype to send to project owners and team members for feedback. I look to collaborate with my team to figure out the functionality, experience, and design of a product.
One of my favorite parts of the process, now I start designing how this product will look to our customers. Either by creating a new visual identity and UI library or advocating for a consistent brand identity by sticking to company guidelines. This is where I start taking some simple wireframes and transforming them to polished mockups.
Across platforms, across browsers, and across devices it should all work and look great. By keeping an open line of communication with all team members, we can work together to continuously test for bugs and find out how to fix them for the best possible customer experience.
And then test again. Listen to customer feedback and keep improving.
Document our successes and analyze our mistakes to continuously make our customer's experience the best it can be.