Although the most visible result of UX work are wireframes and sitemaps there are other activities that are least as important for the User Experience design process. To get a grip of user needs, create understanding for use situations and business needs, as well as perform evaluations with users are all imperative activities in a well performed UX process. Depending on assignment and restrictions that exist in terms of time and money sufficient energy can’t always be devoted to all these areas. Despite this I always try to include the following 3 phases in my work.

1. Discovery
   Any given use context consists of its own unique combination of users, tasks and background settings. When entering a new assignment I therefore always put some time into finding out what is important for those who are the target users and create an understanding of the use situation. Business goals, competitors and current trends also have to be examined and evaluated in respect to project goals and objectives. Typical activities are those that are described here under the headline ”Concept & strategy creation”
2. Design
   As soon as I begin to design I start to visualise how the system should operate and try to get a grip of what is crucial for those who are the target users. Important tools in this work are hand drawn sketches, digital prototypes and user evaluations. Perceived user goals, most frequent use cases and business goals collected in the previous Discovery phase are here the main source for directing decisions about design and features.  The most common activities during this phase are those that are stated under the headline ”Information architecture” here.
3. Evaluation
   Even though well performed research and design has been done misconceptions and time restraints can mislead even the best designers or most experienced design team. Evaluating your design together with real users is therefore an important part of any User Experience driven design work. Even if this is an important last phase, this should also be performed continually throughout the process, if possible.  Check out ”User experience evaluation” for examples of  evaluations that are performed during this phase.