Summary: UX professionals produce a wide variety of deliverables: 11 different deliverable formats were used by at least half the respondents in our study. Deliverables rated the most effective varied substantially by target audience.

UX work happens in many different contexts, from very lean startups that employ Agile methodologies and embrace little documentation, to consulting engagements for third-party clients, all the way to large corporate or government environments with strict process and documentation requirements. What unites these very different work environments is the need for UX professionals to communicate design ideas, research findings, and the context of projects to a range of audiences. Though we often communicate our work in conversation with others, deliverables help us document work for discussion, presentation, implementation, and later reference.

Deliverables and Artifacts

Let’s back up a moment and discuss exactly what we mean by the word deliverables.

Traditionally, in the context of user experience, a deliverable is a document that serves as a record of work that has occurred. The deliverables for a project are the tangible record of the work that occurred, whether that work was research or design. Some of the classic deliverables that come out of UX work are usability-test reports, wireframes and prototypes, site maps, personas, and flowcharts.

In many cases (especially when working in consulting engagements), the deliverables are agreed upon before the work begins, and are noted in a contract or statement of work; however, in other cases they are created as needed to communicate specific ideas throughout a project’s lifecycle. According to our research, 82% of UX professionals collaborate with other team members on the deliverables they produce.

(Even though the very word “deliverable” may be more commonly used when working with an outside party — such as a consultant or design agency — that is paid to “deliver” something, for our purposes internal documentation also counts as deliverables. Even if you’re a solitary UX person who produces a document for your own delectation, it’s a deliverable.)

Since UX work takes place in such widely differing environments, the types of deliverables vary hugely, from formal reports and presentations, all the way to whiteboard sketches that only get documented when someone takes pictures with a smartphones and emails them to the team. We communicate so many different things that we often need to use different levels of polish to make our point clearly with different audiences. In the past, there was often a need to draw a distinction between formal deliverables that were long, carefully crafted and edited documents, and the piecemeal artifacts that naturally emerged in the course of UX work.

However, as more and more companies adopt an Agile or Agile-like workflow that deprioritizes documentation, there is ever more reason to share our less polished artifacts with team members, project stakeholders, executives, developers, and clients.

Most Frequently Produced Deliverables

We recently ran a survey with 86 UX professionals, asking them about the deliverables they produce on a regular basis, and the audiences with whom they share them.

One interesting finding is that even the 83% of respondents who worked in an Agile environment (or employ a hybrid workflow that uses Agile features) still regularly produced deliverables in their workflow, although the Agile methodology deemphasizes unnecessary documentation, and considers it a form of waste. This is a clear indication that Agile isn’t deliverable-free — it just refocuses those efforts towards more useful deliverables and away from reports that tended to not be widely read.

For each type of deliverable, respondents were asked how frequently they produced it, from “often,” to “never.” The most frequently produced deliverables are listed in the chart below. While these deliverables tended to be produced most frequently, as we’ll see later, not all of them were perceived as being equally useful for all audiences.

Unsurprisingly, the classic types of UX deliverables were the most popular, with wireframes, prototypes, flowcharts, site maps, and usability/analytics reports being the five most frequently produced. Interestingly, style guides and pattern libraries (a relatively new type of UX deliverable that has become popular among Agile teams) was very close behind usability/analytics reports, with 61% of respondents saying they produce it either “often” or “sometimes.”

Which Deliverable for Which Audience?

In our survey, UX professionals were also asked which deliverables were the most effective for several different audiences. For each of the intended audiences, our respondents were asked to select up to 4 types of deliverables that they found effective.

1. Internal Management

As illustrated in the Figure 3 below, when it came to communicating with managers and internal stakeholders, our respondents most frequently chose interactive prototypes and usability/analytics reports.

Interactive prototypes offer an interactive experience that’s most reflective of the final product, and, thus, are a powerful tool for showing what the user experience will ultimately be like. Usability reports and other research information were also found to be an especially useful with management, since these present clear evidence for the specific UX recommendations being made.

Only 25% of our respondents found pixel-perfect visual mockups to be a useful tool to communicate ideas to their managerial audiences. Considering how frequently we hear from UX professionals that they feel pressure to present high-fidelity visual designs to their stakeholder audiences, it’s interesting that these aren’t seen as especially effective deliverables for communicating ideas to internal management.

2. Third-Party Clients

However, when working with external client audiences, pixel-perfect mockups were one of the most frequently selected deliverables, with 47% of respondents choosing a high-fidelity mockup as effective. The only deliverables more frequently selected for client work were interactive prototypes (67%). This suggests that when working with external client audiences who may have a limited level of experience with UX deliverables, a premium is still placed on visual design, and that for this type of stakeholder, there is a perceived advantage in showing functionality, information architecture, and interaction design embedded in beautiful and realistic mockups.

3. Developers and Engineers

When it came to communicating ideas to developers (both for collaboration and for delivering specifications for implementation), again, interactive prototypes were chosen as being the most effective. Other deliverables less helpful with other stakeholder audiences were much more popular for engineers: specifically flowcharts, site maps, and style guides. These types of deliverables are focused strongly on structural details and interaction specifics that are critical for implementation purposes, so it comes as no surprise that these are especially useful when communicating with developers.

Lessons Learned

Some clear trends emerged from these data: interactive prototypes are the most popular deliverable across multiple different target audiences, and most UX professionals consider them an effective communication tool for convincing these audiences to move forward with a plan. We did draw a distinction between static wireframes and interactive prototypes in our survey, and a fascinating fact emerged: static wireframes were the most frequently produced deliverable overall (71% of respondents produced static wireframes “often”), but were not chosen in the top 4 most effective deliverables for any audience.

This suggests that noninteractive wireframes tend to be artifacts that UX professionals produce for their own benefit, whether as a natural part of their design process, or for use in usability testing, but those same people don’t frequently share them with others. However, interactive prototypes (at varying levels of visual, interactive, and content fidelity) give audiences a feel for the product’s user experience, and so they’re less abstract representations than block-diagram wireframes.

Usability reports are one of the core deliverables for most audiences, with the notable exception of developer audiences. Presumably, this indicates that the respondents often didn’t have as much of a need to convince developers that usability issues exist, and that deliverables for this audience focused on technical and implementation details.

What these data also make clear is that, outside of prototypes, there is no one-size-fits-all deliverable that will be equally effective with every type of audience. Each type of deliverable is an available tool in the UX professional’s toolbox, and it can become an effective communication tool in the right context and with the right audience.

Get more findings from this research in our full-day course “UX Deliverables” and learn more about the most popular formats in the full-day course “Wireframing and Prototyping.”