The practice of design
I became a designer because I wanted to contribute to improving the quality of life. I find joy in finding ways to make even small things better—like removing the sliding doors on a closet and replace them with beautiful curtains to larger efforts like brightening up an old light bulb factory:
A lightbulb factory became a dark office space.
But after my renovation, became a bright shop and studio.
I believe that the smallest details can create value and bring meaning to our lives. This is what makes design so powerful.
As digital designers, we are not only charged with delivering information but also to create opportunities for positive experiences for users. We have at our disposal, technology, immediacy, and unlimited opportunities to engage people.
When we as a culture are constantly on our devices, we have expectations about how things should work. When our experience doesn’t meet those expectations, we don’t think twice about moving on to find what we need elsewhere. And when things do work right, without friction or confusion, we may not even notice how easy it was. If we can help people achieve what they set out to do within a digital experience without frustrating friction, then we have contributed in a small but positive way, to that person’s life.
Digital experiences have the opportunity to tell a story and participate in a complex system of conversations. To create such powerful tools, you have to know about its people, their environments, their activities and their preferences. The results do not need to have predictable features and predetermined functionality. We should be challenging ourselves to think differently, change our perspectives and always ask questions.
The first step when looking at opportunities, is to enrich my understanding. This can be through a combination of data-driven quantitative research and qualitative research methods that result in rich data to gain insights that help guide our team’s decision making. I enjoy work sessions with my team, as we all contribute to whiteboard sketches and a lively exchanges of ideas. We can establish high-level concepts and agree on a unified vision.
After sketching and sharing visual and interaction ideas with my team, I start drafting designs considering best practices, existing patterns, brand guidelines, and the visual language we have established, or are developing.
After a few designs are ready, we can build prototypes and create a test plan to put in front of guests. Currently, I work on a weekly usability testing schedule, that is usually moderated sessions, however, in between weekly sessions, we may create paper prototypes to test in person or test with in-house colleagues.
As we watch guests use the design, we are also able to iterate the prototype as needed. I believe in updating prototypes when we get significant feedback. That kind of instant updating has an impact on the participant, especially, if they are a member of your frequent user group. They see proof that we are value their feedback and gives us the benefit of getting immediate feedback on an iteration.
Conducting weekly testing allows us to improve our product constantly. We’re always learning, sometimes improving, but always gaining insight.
We try to share our ideas with other teams and stakeholders, to be sure we are all aware of what our teams are working on. Feedback from everyone is always appreciated.
In addition to usability testing, we A/B test options and delve into analytics with our data scientist. The combination of data-driven quantitative research and qualitative research methods that result in rich data, helps us gain insights that guide our decision making.