My involvement as a User Experience designer continues throughout the project's life-cycle. UX Designer's toolbox has a myriad of techniques and methods which can be used in every stage of a project depending on the project scope and requirements.

The typical design process I follow can be split in four main stages:

1. Discovery

2. Ideation

3. Implementation (Design & Build)

4. Launch (+post launch support)

One of the best methods to initiate a project is running a kick-off workshop with the main stakeholders and representatives of the project team. It is important that everybody in on the same page. 

In the first phase of each project we are looking to identify the business’ strengths and weaknesses, user needs and market opportunities which will help us shape a better product strategy. Main activities: Business workshop, Requirements gathering, Competitive market research & analysis and User research. The output of this phase include: Product strategy, a list of requirements and an agreed project scope.

Typically during this phase we start creating visual concepts which are used to stimulate conversations with the client and helping us shape the final proposition. Main activities: Wire-framing, Prototyping and Product testing. By the end of this phase we should have a good idea of the proposed solution and identify the main components/structure of the website/mobile app.

Once the business have signed off the proposed design, we are ready to start building the solution. For this phase we need to have a full cross-functional team including: a UX lead, visual designer, front-end and back-end integration developers, business analysts and a project manager. The exact size of the team depends on the size of and the scope of each project.
During this phase we work closely with the developers, going through the list of requirements and start built the final solution. We also perform product testing with real customers and use the test findings to continually iterate our design. Main activities: Visual guides production (to help developers much the proposed designs), Product Testing,

Before any solution goes live (gets published on the internet/app-store) it passes through Quality Assessment - During this phase we perform design audit to ensure that the end solution is matching our design.

Once the product goes live, we measure and track the performance through analytics and if necessary, we may propose alterations to enhance the product further.

Below are just few artifacts generated in different phases of past projects I've worked on.