How the Sausage gets Made
When designing, I often repeat to my customers the old adage “Content is King.” Nothing we do should impede, but instead support the message we are trying to convey to our end customers. To know how to engage these customers, or end users, we must first learn who they are, what drives them, and how we can meet their needs.
Design Thinking
More than a buzzword, it’s a process in which to get to the root of a problem. What is the perceived problem? Imagine how that would feel if you had that problem. Analyze and determine if the obvious problem is not merely just a symptom of the real problem. Design thinking a cyclical rhythm that can help keep the process of finding solutions for customers lean, iterative, and successful.
Empathize & Define
Who are your users? Find out, an ask them questions. Get them on the phone, or meet with them and talk to them. Actively listen to what they have to say, and define their pain points and their success. Learn from them. Empathize with them. Take their problems as your own and begin to learn and think. Document them, and build a persona of who you are designing for.
Ideate, Prototype, & Test Test Test
Brainstorm. Share Ideas. Come up with solutions to ease your user’s pain points. Define the importance of solutions, and map how valuable the solutions are to the user. Measure the time of implementation, and decide what to work on first. While brainstorming, begin to draw. Crude white board sketches evolve into user flows and diagrams. Wireframes emerge and polished interactive prototypes using design systems begin to appear. Finally, test. Test with your users, your real users. Go into every meeting with them as a student and learn as much as you can from them. It’s not just about what they do with your designs, it’s about what they don’t do. It’s about thinking aloud, and actively listening. It’s about empathy. It’s about failing, learning from failures, and creating something truly useful and intuitive to use.
The Winning Strategies for Success
How do you know what tool to use? There’s an old expression, when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, I’m no hammer. I have a whole toolbox of skills to use on your project. My experience in the industrial and healthcare fields have left me with a powerful set of skills to companion design thinking.
Six Sigma
I'm trained as a Black Belt and am working on my certification. What I love about the DMAIC process (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) is that your project will always have clearly defined priorities, scope, and goals before the project even properly begins. I find a great joy in using statical analysis while researching to determine what the root cause of your problem, how to improve your problem, and how to implement a lasting fix.
LEAN
Nothing, and I mean nothing, can drive a business crazier than waste. Lean methodologies help me create process maps and document what is really happening. These documents can inform Kaizen events to help us reduce waste in your process. Lean is flexible enough to support both Six Sigma and Agile, and is the perfect tool to use alone or in compliment with other processes. I also am a believer in Gemba: Go See, Ask Why, and Show Respect, to document process flows and identify waste.
AGILE
Ceremonies are everything when creating an agile software product. Communication through planning, grooming, scrums, and retros are just some of the ceremonies in which UX can play a helpful part in answering questions before they become defects. Agile relies on research and learning to be adaptive to our environment to pivot to solve whatever need you have in a timely manner.