At the beginning of a UX research and design project a Stakeholder Interview should be conducted to find out the Business Goals, Existing Research including User Research, Competitors and Technological Limitations.
Interviews
Stakeholder Interview — UX Knowledge Base Sketches
Knowledge
UX Process: What It Is, What It Looks Like and Why It’s Important
In this article, we’ll define a general UX design process, as well as the order in which specific UX phases should be taken. We will also see what methods can be used by UX designers during each phase.
Processes, Project Management
UX Process: What It Is, What It Looks Like and Why It’s Important
Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb and not specific usability guidelines.
Creating Empathy Maps is useful for synthesizing research data in order to better understand the users. Empathy Maps are great for creating Personas, identifying users with different mindsets.