Loading
UX design stems from a balance between company goals, user desires, and feasibility. From personas and journey maps to wireframes, mockups, and interactive prototypes, I aim to create usable, enjoyable, and engaging experiences that drive the goals of internal stakeholders while satisfying the desires of the user simultaneously.
The disparity between a person’s mental model of the way the world works and the way it actually works can make or break an interaction. I believe that a human-centered design (HCD) process is key in ensuring your user experience (digital or non-digital) is in accord with your customer’s mental model. From content inventories to card sorts, treejacks, and site maps, understanding the way that users expect your content hierarchy to be displayed leads to faster, more intuitive exploration.
Once the experiential level details are starting to feel like they are in a good spot and concepts/features are validated, I proceed with high-fidelity design. From Gestalt principles to color theory, my philosophy of UI Design is to manipulate elements in a way that creates a visual hierarchy that leads users down the right path.
During the visioning process, I like to have a team discussion about how to define success from a business perspective and how we will learn what success looks like for our target users. UX research helps us know what our users need, where we currently stand in meeting those needs, and what needs to be done to close the gap. By defining key metrics to test and measure, we can take the next steps towards better interactions through both quantitative and qualitative guidance.
Effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. These are the key points of analysis for usability tests & reports, both formative and summative – the building blocks of a usable, enjoyable interaction. I kickoff the usability engineering process through heuristics evaluations, cognitive walkthroughs, and expert evaluations, quickly moving towards directly involving users.
Lions and tigers and heatmaps, oh my! Informed design should receive influence not only from UX tools & methodologies, but from good ol’ data analysis as well; the two disciplines are synergistic. Google Analytics? CrazyEgg? Mixpanel? My daily read. Together we can create segmentations and analyze process flows while doing the “bounce rate” dance to keep users exploring.
Your content needs to be seven things: valuable, useful, usable, desirable, accessible, findable, and credible. Through a proper understanding of business objectives, target user desires, and structural limitations or advantages based on the IA of your particular interface, the right content strategy can deter an early user exit and spark a genuine interest in your product.
Using design to connect people, product, and business
Email: dash@alum.northwestern.edu
Phone: +1 312 478 7147
