My Design Process
High-level examples of some of the various steps involved in my design process.
🤔 Discovery
I perform a lot of upfront discovery to learn as much as possible about the problems that may need to be solved. User and stakeholder interviews and observations lead to numerous shared artifacts, including personas, empathy maps, journey maps, user stories, flowcharts, etc.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” - Albert Einstein
👩🎨 Design Exploration
My design process is an iterative process filled with exploration tempered by constraints such as the target platform's capabilities, time horizon, development complexities, budget, etc. However, the north star is always usability informed by empathy for the user!
🧠 Brainstorming
One of my favorite parts of the UX design process is brainstorming. I love working with a team of passionate people to explore different ways to solve complex and often elusive problems. Give me a whiteboard, colored markers, and a pile of sticky notes, and I'll be a happy camper!
🔶 Prototyping
Creating rapid prototypes is one of my fortes. Soliciting hands-on feedback from various stakeholders and target users has been invaluable in my design process, allowing me to iterate quickly and often.
My web development experience allows me to leverage advanced scripting features to build prototypes that include state management, store user input in variables, and playback audio to provide much more realistic experiences than can typically be achieved. If the prototyping application cannot deliver the desired level of interaction, I will often create something from scratch using JavaScript-based frameworks such as Ionic.
🎨 Design Systems
I often build design systems with reusable components and clearly defined standards to eliminate duplication and reduce ambiguity. However, as a product scales in complexity and depth, a standard design system becomes increasingly hard to maintain, so tools like Storybook are an excellent way to reign in the inevitable chaos by streamlining the design, development, and testing process.