Design at Pocket Prep
We're grounded by our design process — it's not a rigid checklist, but a guide that keeps us thoughtful and makes sure important steps don't get skipped. Below are the key steps of our process. We collaborate closely with our product team at every step. We highly value testing and using data to inform our design work.
Define & Align
Meeting with all relevant stakeholders to define goals, success metrics, and roles/responsibilities. Product managers often lead this phase, with design as a collaborator. Some projects have shaping ahead of a project kickoff to explore and narrow in on scope.
Research & Inspiration
The goal of this phase is to broaden our understanding of the problem or the context it lives in. This phase is a lot of question asking:
- Is what we’re trying to do something that will help our customers?
- Do they want it?
- What do they care about? Want?
- Who is doing ______ well? How are they doing it differently?
- What our competitors doing?
- Is there an analogous experience to try for us to understand our user’s world better?
- Where can we find inspiration outside our focus or from a different industry?
- Do we need to adjust our goals or metrics?
Wireframes
Lo-Fidelity is for cheap exploration of many ideas, trying to not get tied to anything too quickly but to consider multiple options: Broad, shallow exploration → Narrow, deeper exploration
- How might this work?
- How might this roughly look?
- What are some different options?
- Consider extremes (in content, users, uses)
- What errors would we need?
- Is this technically feasible?
- How difficult/expensive/much time would this be to make?
- Can we make this simpler?
Visuals
To move to high-fidelity, the basic structure and how it works should be agreed upon from the lo-fidelity stage. If there are still a lot of open questions and unknowns, it’s best to go back to the lo-fidelity phase to reach an agreed-upon direction.
Similar to wireframes, visuals also typically involve starting broad and considering a few options to narrowing down to a final design with all of the details and micro-iterations. When working on redesigning components or templates, there should be more broad work and multiple versions considered as a design team.
Dev Support
Work closely with development to test visuals and functionality as they are built. Designers will answer questions from the team and cover any use cases that were missed. The living product is the end deliverable and product, not the design documentation. Designers check all work in development. We call this VQA, visual quality assurance.
Design at Pocket Prep
We're grounded by our design process — it's not a rigid checklist, but a guide that keeps us thoughtful and makes sure important steps don't get skipped. Below are the key steps of our process. We collaborate closely with our product team at every step. We highly value testing and using data to inform our design work.
Define & Align
Meeting with all relevant stakeholders to define goals, success metrics, and roles/responsibilities. Product managers often lead this phase, with design as a collaborator. Some projects have shaping ahead of a project kickoff to explore and narrow in on scope.
Research & Inspiration
The goal of this phase is to broaden our understanding of the problem or the context it lives in. This phase is a lot of question asking:
- Is what we’re trying to do something that will help our customers?
- Do they want it?
- What do they care about? Want?
- Who is doing ______ well? How are they doing it differently?
- What our competitors doing?
- Is there an analogous experience to try for us to understand our user’s world better?
- Where can we find inspiration outside our focus or from a different industry?
- Do we need to adjust our goals or metrics?
Wireframes
Lo-Fidelity is for cheap exploration of many ideas, trying to not get tied to anything too quickly but to consider multiple options: Broad, shallow exploration → Narrow, deeper exploration
- How might this work?
- How might this roughly look?
- What are some different options?
- Consider extremes (in content, users, uses)
- What errors would we need?
- Is this technically feasible?
- How difficult/expensive/much time would this be to make?
- Can we make this simpler?
Visuals
To move to high-fidelity, the basic structure and how it works should be agreed upon from the lo-fidelity stage. If there are still a lot of open questions and unknowns, it’s best to go back to the lo-fidelity phase to reach an agreed-upon direction.
Similar to wireframes, visuals also typically involve starting broad and considering a few options to narrowing down to a final design with all of the details and micro-iterations. When working on redesigning components or templates, there should be more broad work and multiple versions considered as a design team.
Dev Support
Work closely with development to test visuals and functionality as they are built. Designers will answer questions from the team and cover any use cases that were missed. The living product is the end deliverable and product, not the design documentation. Designers check all work in development. We call this VQA, visual quality assurance.
Design at Pocket Prep
We're grounded by our design process — it's not a rigid checklist, but a guide that keeps us thoughtful and makes sure important steps don't get skipped. Below are the key steps of our process. We collaborate closely with our product team at every step. We highly value testing and using data to inform our design work.
Define & Align
Meeting with all relevant stakeholders to define goals, success metrics, and roles/responsibilities. Product managers often lead this phase, with design as a collaborator. Some projects have shaping ahead of a project kickoff to explore and narrow in on scope.
Research & Inspiration
The goal of this phase is to broaden our understanding of the problem or the context it lives in. This phase is a lot of question asking:
- Is what we’re trying to do something that will help our customers?
- Do they want it?
- What do they care about? Want?
- Who is doing ______ well? How are they doing it differently?
- What our competitors doing?
- Is there an analogous experience to try for us to understand our user’s world better?
- Where can we find inspiration outside our focus or from a different industry?
- Do we need to adjust our goals or metrics?
Wireframes
Lo-Fidelity is for cheap exploration of many ideas, trying to not get tied to anything too quickly but to consider multiple options: Broad, shallow exploration → Narrow, deeper exploration
- How might this work?
- How might this roughly look?
- What are some different options?
- Consider extremes (in content, users, uses)
- What errors would we need?
- Is this technically feasible?
- How difficult/expensive/much time would this be to make?
- Can we make this simpler?
Visuals
To move to high-fidelity, the basic structure and how it works should be agreed upon from the lo-fidelity stage. If there are still a lot of open questions and unknowns, it’s best to go back to the lo-fidelity phase to reach an agreed-upon direction.
Similar to wireframes, visuals also typically involve starting broad and considering a few options to narrowing down to a final design with all of the details and micro-iterations. When working on redesigning components or templates, there should be more broad work and multiple versions considered as a design team.
Dev Support
Work closely with development to test visuals and functionality as they are built. Designers will answer questions from the team and cover any use cases that were missed. The living product is the end deliverable and product, not the design documentation. Designers check all work in development. We call this VQA, visual quality assurance.