PROJECT KICKOFF
No matter the type of project, it’s critical to have a kickoff meeting to ensure everyone in the room (the product owner, all stakeholders, designers, developers, project managers, and SCRUM team) is aligned on the overall problem(s) being solved, business goals and objectives, and the primary audience of the product or experience.
RESEARCH
Once the client and project team is aligned, I get started on researching the company/brand to understand their offerings and systems in place, interviewing and observing the people effected by the problem and/or potential solution as well as Subject Matter Experts, and a hands on experience with any existing processes or tools. Next, I take a look at the companies competitors to get an understanding of the competitive landscape and industry standards. I have a passion and a knack for gathering, synthesizing and organizing complex data, requirements and constraints and I love building personas and user journeys.
PLAN & DEFINE
Now that we have a clear direction of the business objectives and end-user problems & processes, I guide the stakeholders and developers through feature prioritization exercises, discussing the desirability, viability and feasibility of each feature. Once the MVP is decided, I like to build user flows of the current processes and in tandem begin enhanced user flows highlighting new features and processes. This helps designers, developers and stakeholders visualize a skeleton of how everything will come together. From here we can begin to document the backlog with user stories and get a head start on requirements and acceptance criteria. As we finalize the flows we can begin designing the site map/interface overview.
Experience Map
Throughout the course of every project, I fill out an experience map which includes a step-by-step view of the persona(s), existing technology and processes, the time spent on each phase, and pain points along the way. From this, I am able to collaborate with teammates and the client to innovate and come up with opportunities to solve the current end-user and business problems and ideate on hypotheses to either build a proof of concept, or if the product is desirable, viable and feasible - bring it all the way through to delivering an MVP. Documenting what each user is doing, thinking and feeling at each step allows us to gain empathy for the end-user, which helps build a product that truly solves their needs and meets them where they are at in the process. I am a big believer in the Service Design process.
DESIGN & TEST
Collaborating with other designers, business analysts and developers as well as staying off of the computer and on the whiteboard as long as possible during the design phase is extremely important. Getting feedback and usability testing on sketches, wireframes, prototypes or working code as early as possible from the end-user(s) is critical. I have a lot of experience as a hands on-designer, or overseeing a team of Experience Designers to create wireframes and low to high-fidelity prototypes to leverage for usability testing, client feedback and to communicate the designs with the developers.
