More and more organization understand the importance and value of design. Even though designers are considered as users' advocate, they rather play a role of middleman between business (company) and its customers while trying (and succeeding) to make interaction with a digital product beneficial for both parties. This leads to the active engagement and introducing of designers into teams in the companies and startups of various scales. In general, there are three stages of the product where the involvement of a designer could be needed.
Below these stages are described in more details.
This is the most common type of what people are expecting when they think about collaboration with a designer. This includes the creation of the visual part of the product from the idea (or early mockups) to the final view when it is already clear how everything should eventually look like. It is easier to understand what happens there if compare it with construction. Architect (and in our case designer) takes all clients to request into consideration and after several elaborations present the drawings and renderings of how the building will look like when is erected. However, as in the case of the construction industry, the design of the digital product also passes a couple of phases during the whole process.
This is the first phase and one may describe it as "getting to know what should be done". During this stage, the designer needs to understand the main idea of the product, its goals and objectives. It is also a time of market research and understanding the business model behind this project. It is possible to call it also a "preparation" phase, since during this period the core functionality of the product should be decided and discussed, as well as some basic schedule and roadmap for the design milestones. There will be a lot of calls (in some cases, even meetings and even workshops) related to product discussion and iterations for clarifications regarding the future designs.
At the end of this phase, a client may have some of the following documents from a designer:
This is the second stage, where the designer should already have a solid understanding of what the product idea is all about as well as the scope of work that should be done. The features are stated, the connections between various parts of the products are clear. This means, that now it is time to put all together visually. Wireframes are used exactly for that! In general, there are two types of wireframes: high-fidelity and low-fidelity. The latest is more common since they are created just to understand what functional entities be presented on what screen, as well as approximately understand what position on this screen should they occupy. This provides a possibility to identify weak points that were previously missed and adjust general user flow. It may lead to the need of getting rid of some ideas that don't work as they expected to. Wireframes also could be used for early testing on real users. Even though designs in such cases are very rough and not that representative, they still may highlight some flaws in UX of the product.
At the end of this phase, a client may have some of the following documents from a designer: