Defining personas, use cases per persona and user journeys. Create and conduct user test ( screen test, card sorting etc.)
Create wireframe/prototypes
My typical UX journey throughout a project
Requirements gathering -
Sitting down with the project owner/project manager/ clients/stake holders at the very early stages to capture the project idea, feature requirements and defining target audience etc.
Usability analysis and testing
Create quick wire-frame/prototypes based on the gathered data,run them through project manager/test users and iterate.
Create hi-fidelity mocks
Hand over the wire-frames and have extensive discussions with the dev team to explain all the features and findings. Then while the dev team gets involved in development of the back-ends, create hi-fidelity mocks for front ends and get them approved.
Front-end integration
Support dev team on front-ends by converting the mocks into HTML with necessary JS/CSS.