UX Design Process
UX Design is a set of processes, a way to approach problem solving, a philosophy. Design thinking isn’t a canned approach to fix any ill, its a way to find the context of problems and solve the root causes, not just a band-aid.
What I do in
UX Design
What can you expect from me? What experiences have I been in that inform my process in my career? What am I within organizations when designing? I am a…
Design Leader
Be a passionate advocate for design within the organization, creating thoughtful, user-friendly solutions for complex applications.
Distiller
Focus work on distilling the customer experience to the finest level. Cutting out what doesn't matter in order to perfect the interface, with a focus on executing the highest quality work for my users
Advocate
Truly understand my users, be their advocate and ensure the organization also understands them using design thinking processes like personas, jobs to be done and other framework
Results Focused Designer
Developing all designs from wireframes and prototypes into high-fidelity design and then 'onto the glass' - ensuring what was ideated, designed and tested is exactly what the customer experiences.
Facilitator
Lead user-centric design meetings in collaboration with product, engineering, and executive teams to evaluate all features
Collaborator
Work across the organization to standardize and educate others on user research, design systems and visual languages.
Unifier
Facilitate design sprints with cross-functional teams, business partners, and subject matter experts across the company to inform product strategy.
Motivator
Share my work with radical transparency within the organization to get feedback, and provide feedback to others to ensure we are all executing the highest quality work for our users.
Design Champion
Be a champion of design thinking, encourage and inspire creativity, and build a culture of feedback.
Strategy
Launching new features is not easy, Launching new products is even harder. It takes design leadership working across cross-funtional teams, unified in purpose making deliberate, smart choices, acting on vision to successfully launch good product. I have launched 3 fully featured, user loved products from just an idea to real users.
Ideation
Simple, functional, beautiful design comes from hard work, ideation, iteration and vision. It all starts with collaboration across subject matter experts, customer empathy processes and a good whiteboard.
Iteration
Once the ideas are vetted and developed, I throw everything against the wall. When iterating there are no bad ideas, I get everything I can into visual designs, push prod and test everything. The best ideas rise to the top, merge with other idea, get adjusted and begin to become more cohesive. At this point the feature or product starts to form into something real, an artifact of the vision that can be tested and put back into the forge. It starts broad and wild and becomes distilled, improved and takes on a life of its own.
Testing
User Testing has as many techniques, processes and approaches as any discipline, but the goal is the same - to understand, truly grok, the customer experience. The practice of cultivating customer empathy is done with the goal of truly understanding the context your clients are in, their goals, responsibilities and mind set. Whether you are developing personas, jobs to be done or other methods it all starts with customer interviews, well written questions designed not to confirm biases, but to grow understanding.
Design
Testing is never done, but as you collect more feedback and develop more user empathy, it has to be implemented and worked into designs. The process is iterative and never done. Users change, redesigns and organic feature growth should be revisited to ensure they are still doing what they need to be doing. A bug fix might alter functionality in hard to detect ways, so you must remain vigilant and always return to and advocate for customers. Sometimes a whole new sub product is created and the process has to be started from the beginning, but most of the time, if you keep the loop going, you can just keep building on your knowledge and customer empathy and continuously improve the customer experience. The more time spent teaching your organization design thinking and customer experience, the easier it is to develop amazing digital experiences.