The Big Picture

Story Maps

It's critical for any product to define focus and direction or the team risks distraction and feature creep. I can help create Story Maps & Vision Statements of what the product should solve when it ships as well as where the product will be in 5, 10 years.

Having a vision unifies the team behind a commonly agreed goal.

Ensuring Delivery

Project Planning

In collaboration with development I break down the desired end result into stages that allow us to both execute efficiently and test iteratively. By being agile the project can adjust direction based on usability test feedback without excessive disruption to the codebase.

First Principles

Distilling Requirements.

Before a design can start it's critical to understand what the customer needs and what can be delivered. My goto method for brainstorming with users & stakeholders is the 'Affinity Diagram'

An interactive approach that cycles between big picture overview and detailed analysis.

Architecture

Users and their workflows

With requirements created the next step is to define end to end workflows that specify how the user will interact with the system, and how it will respond.

From these workflow diagrams I can then start to create prototypes for the various steps in the flow

Understand Your Users

User Personas.

By refining user and market research a team can refer to and internalize who they are building for and why. Having personas for target users keeps the team in focus and helps avoid feature creep.

Design Time

'Paper' Prototyping

Whether it's on the back of a napkin, in a sketchbook, on a whiteboard or digital sketch.. this is where the actual UI is first expressed. I practice Nemawashi by continuously iterating with developers and stakeholders.

Rapid Prototyping

Design, evaluate, iterate.

I pride myself on my ability to quickly produce mid-fidelity prototypes and iterate on them based on feedback from stakeholders and through user testing.

Animation

Code is expensive

UI design is driven by exploring ideas before a developer has to codify them. Some ideas dont work well in static prototypes. Through a variety of tools I can easily animate concepts to help a team understand the end result and whether it's worth investing in.

Interaction notation

Specification

Developed in collaboration with http://www.linowski.ca/sketching.php I helped develop and practice 'Interactive Sketch Notation' as a permanent way to capture & define how the user will interact with the UI

Production deliverables

Visual Design

From iconography to stylesheets, when the user interface is built I can supply the visuals.

Bear in mind, I'm not a real visual designer!

I generally take a conservative & muted approach to visual design, I prefer the interface have as little distraction as possible between the user and the information they need.