I’m Trevor, a Digital Product Designer

Know your audience and don’t make assumptions. Before the first sketches can begin you’ve got to take stock of what your users want, what your stakeholders are looking for, and what the competition is doing – that means audience interviews and persona creation, stakeholder interviews, and plenty of research.

Make a plan and stay organized. It’s important to create a roadmap for everything involved in a project and to set realistic timelines. From there you can start to map content hierarchies and your site/app structure, develop wireframes and prototype the more complex components, and get a jump on copywriting.

Make good on all that planning with intelligent and beautiful design. This starts with the creation of a style tile/guide where things like colour, type, and iconography are explored and evolves into the development of a design system of components and fully-fledged page mockups for various screen widths.

Nothing should ever be set in stone. After launching it's important to gather feedback and understand how your users are using your product and/or website. From there you can make iterations and adjustments and test what works best for your users and yields the greatest results over time.