The Rainbow Stack: A Casual Guide to UX Design

For many design hopefuls starting out on the user experience design journey can be a bit of an odyssey. There seems to be an ever-increasing number of job titles and an equally dizzying array of specialized skill sets that accompany them.

As the intensity of your inquiry increases, so too does your mounting self-doubt. Just then, a wild question appears; it skips your mental queue and jumps to the head of the line. It isn’t the usual: “What would my base salary be?” or “Why didn’t I major in CS?” but rather: “Where should I start?”

While it’s easy to get hung up on all the flashy tools, like affinity maps and wireframing, they don’t paint the full picture of UX design. The user’s experience is greater than the sum of its parts, and perspective holds the key to understanding how these pieces all fit together.

The Rainbow Stack is a roadmap to the full UX design process and endeavors to answer the question: “When should we use what and why?”