“We are not artists or poets. We are artisans and craftsmen. Our products solve problems. They do not hang on museum walls.”
Design Strategy
Design Strategy is simply leveraging Design Thinking to solve business problems. While most have heard about the importance of leveraging UX Design to create sticky products, there is also a sister discipline called Service Design that addresses the customer experience when interacting with a company and its digital ecosystem.
This section contains a brief case study illustrating some of the Service Design work I did during my time at PowerDMS.
Prototypes
The secret to rapid prototyping is just that - quick “sketches” that define the core of the user experience. These artifacts help us quickly vet out design solutions with minimal time and cost. The level of fidelity varies based on need and requirements, but the end goal should to be to illustrate the series of interactions we are asking our users to engage in. The main advantage to prototypes is that it helps us quickly test with end users without dedicating development resources on what may be potentially a dead end.
This section contains a few prototypes of projects I have worked on over the years.
Design Artifacts
During the course of my career, I’ve learned the importance of solid, succinct documentation when working with cross functional teams. It’s important to have a plan but authoring elaborate and ornate project documentation adds significant time to the design phase of any project. I’ve seen my share of both good and bad and because of these experiences, have honed my approach accordingly. Basically, my general philosophy when it comes to documentation is to keep it minimal and lean.
UI and Visual Design
There is no denying the importance of aesthetics when defining a user experience. There have been multiple studies that have researched the various ways the look and feel of a solution can either help or hurt the experience of using a digital product. One of my favorite books on the subject is Emotional Design by Donald Norman. In it, he not only manages to explain why the human mind subconsciously looks for it, but also how aesthetics can help overcome product shortcomings.
My initial training was in graphic design and visual communications, so I have always had an eye for clean minimalist designs. I’m inspired by the Bauhaus school and modernism in general. Ultimately, I don’t see form as subservient to function or vice versa. I see them as two halves of a greater whole that defines the human condition (emotion and logic). To address both is to truly design for humans.
While my focus these days has been on strategy and design leadership, this section has a few examples of some of the visual design work I have done over the course of the years.