“What do you do?” my co-workers ask…
I show them… I tell them…
I look at the big picture. I look at the small picture. I am intuitive. I am smart… I become the ‘use cases’.
I am the user.
I ask questions. It’s more than patterns… It’s more than colors. I analyze the what’s there. I listen to what is needed. I brainstorm technology workarounds. I make sure it makes sense. I make things clear.
I create solutions to solve the ‘right’ problem.
“ahhh…
I still don’t get it…”
It can be hard to explain what a UX person does. I had found these awesome illustrations on the web that describes it beautifully. The below illustration shows UX design and development interaction. It is planned, thoughtful and iterative.
unfortunately for so many assignments… the process often feels a little something more like this graphic below…
*find credits to share…
My Recent Work
For the last 4 years, I have “worn many hats”. I have been the UX designer and early contributor of our “start up” team, I became a core member, involved in every stage-from thought leadership, concept mockups, use cases to product design/development and marketing.
Product Development and Innovation- The Bird’s Eye View
What do you do when your team gives you nearly nothing but an idea to start with?
Design Thinking:
You start with “design thinking” -researching, brainstorming and creating concepts… You become the user and create mockups that solve the need.
Below are a collection of my research screenshots of the client’s current application and their future designs found online. I made note of of the important concepts that our dev team might need to keep track of within our application.
(Click any images shown below for a larger view)
I needed to anticipate how our developing technology would handle the workflow before I would know how to best show the results to the user .
Proof of Concepts: The mock ups amazed our partners… somehow it was ‘exactly what they were thinking’. What seemed like an amazing coincidence was the result of the work done during the design thinking phase.
After additional requirements were drafted, a data table view was requested. I created concepts the team wanted to see… but also created a concept I felt added value.
It didn’t receive traction with the team… but that changed when our professional consultant had a big “AH HA” moment. She saw herself using this view and combination of the data. This is what she wanted and needed!
This view officially broke the original assumptions and in agile fashion, we shifted gears.
Agile Development: Within 10 months, we had most of the core components ready for our BETA release.
We often said we were building the plane as we flew it and I do believe this is true. I developed the style and patterns as we worked…
The home page showed documents at multiple stages within our application. The documents were managed in a project view.
There were three very similar interfaces that were used for slightly different purposes. The first was an interface for validating documents and the extracted entities. When automation fell short, a user could manually validate the data. This data could then be used to better train the models and accelerate the machine learning algorithms.
There were interfaces built for document training and managing the entities and numerous modals designed.
… I made sure there were no loose ends as our development team burned the midnight oil making sure all the data was connecting where it should.
Our Beta application was released and being used in-house with our client’s documents.
Yes, I’m afraid it’s even difficult for me to explain what I do. Looking back, I’ve tried to put together some examples of my thought process so you might catch a glimpse of what a day in my life might be like.
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