The research phase of the design process is perhaps the most indeterminate when it comes to scripting a plan to enact. I have briefly covered: the objective of holding stakeholder interviews, the importance of establishing design tenets, the benefits of doing a competitive analysis, the concept behind running a heuristic evaluation, how to create personas, and the value of card sorting, user surveys, and brainstorming.

Further exploration and study of these and other research methods will definitely be needed before you will feel confident in your decisions. Though just a brief primer, an understanding of the techniques I have briefly described should get you pointed in the right direction.

Now that we have a brief overview of some of the more common UX research techniques, let's review some of the more popular information architecture and visual design techniques.