"It is not iteration if you only do it once."
- Jeff Patton
Designing a product is no abracadabra. It involves focus and attention on many sources of feedack.
My design process is based on listening what users (and people) are saying, to understand what they actually are needing.
My design process is based on listening what users (and people) are saying, to understand what they actually are needing.
The steps of my flow are imbued with one of the biggest lessons I learned practicing UX as a professional: fail fast, learn faster.
Design Thinking, Creative Thinking and Iteration
We are all humans and we all face problems to solve during our lives. As humans, though, we also created frameworks and processes that can assist us and ease the solving of those problems, regardless of how complex or frivolous they can be. Putting a little bit of extra sauce in it, the creativity sparkle, changes the problem solving process into something more: an opportunity to make our lives better in innovatives ways.
Define and Empatize
The design process always starts by framing important questions: who is the user? What do they want to ultimately achieve? How are they currently interact with their struggle point?
Focus is also needed on the product/brand side: Who are we? How can we help the users to achieve their goal? What are the most important things the stakeholders want the product to focus on?
To answer those questions research is involved as a core part of the process.
Ideate, Prototype, Test...and Iterate!
Charts, diagrams, flows and screens. Everything is important, but even more important is to share and communicate with fellow team members. Brainstorming and sync on ideas can lead to unexpected (yet ground breaking!) discoveries and solutions. To challenge those ideas and scenario is part of the wireframing and prototyping step: everything works great in theory. But what about when those ideas are turned into something tangible? Proper testing with users is the last step...or is it? Iteration is what makes the Design Thinking process really valuable.
“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”
Agile and Lean
The core of "fail fast, learn faster" passes through an Lean UX process. When you work within a cross-functional team, it is fundamental to keep the communication process flowing effortlessly. Collecting feedback as quick as possible makes quick responses affordable and sticks errors to the minimum.
Best practices on communication grativate around Agile methodology. Ceremonies are the building blocks for an agile software product, and the UX Designer can be (and should) an important ally and facilitator in all of them.
Composition, Gestalt and Cognitive Psychology
Great design can't live forever in the designer's mind. That's why an important part of my core skills are formed by visual representation ones. What I create follows the rules of composition and the principles of gestalt, guided by the knowledge aquired in cognitive psychology during my years of academical formation.
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