SKILLS:
User Interface Design, Usability Testing, User Research, Experience Strategy, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, User Journeys, Mental Models, Heuristic Evaluation, Rapid Prototyping, Personas, Animation & Video, Quality Assurance, Search Engine Optimisation, Web Best Practises, Copy Writing, Task Analysis, Graphic Design, Competitive Analysis, Wireframes, Task Flows.
User Experience [UX]
From idea to reality, any piece of design always starts with its user's experience at the core of what it is doing. Throughout my career I have been the lead on multiple projects focusing on the user's experience. The process usually starts with a pen, paper and some sticky notes. I use processes like brainstorming, competitive analysis, mental models, red route analysis, storyboarding and user personas to help me start to shape and sketch what the wireframes, user flows and low fidelity mockups that makeup what my project will look like.
Often on a user experience project, you must conduct research both on your own and in front of your desired target market. I have experience conducting face-to-face user research and experience using a technique called shadowing.
User experience doesn't finish when you have your product built. I am vastly experienced in designing product onboarding campaigns and writing and documenting FAQs and help documents that improve users' abilities to solve their own problems while also helping to build brand loyalty and reduce churn rate.
user interface [UI]
From my days of being an industrial designer - drawing straight lines and circles freehand, I have always been fascinated with how shapes come together to form user interfaces. Over time I have perfected this craft using both adobe creative cloud applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator, and in more recent times the new kid on the block; sketch.
Before passing an interface design onto a development team, a necessary part of the interface design process is to prototype your design using products such as InVision. This helps me to get a feel for how my end user will interact with my design and whether or not the decisions I made in the UX phase will be validated.
Once happy with an interface, I use a nice tool called Zeplin to present my design to a front end engineer. As a designer, I find it is important to be code and syntax literate. Coding can be daunting to anyone who doesn't work with it everyday, but an understanding of the fundamentals and restraints of development are imperative to a design being successfully implemented.
Interfaces should be built so that components can be easily interchanged as per requirements.
User Interface frameworks that I like using.
animation and videography
I love animation. Subtle animation within a UI is the "je ne sais quoi" of any project. Hover overs, transitions, reactions and all animations put the icing on a design and bring it to life. In my career to date, I have always endeavoured to improve and add to my animation repertoire. Recently I have added videography to my skillset. Video, when used correctly, can have huge advantages in engaging users and improving website bounce rates.
Bringing it all together
It isn't good enough to simply pass over multiple design files to a client or other team members. I have documented the design process that I have implemented to ensure both the highest of design quality and also the highest quality of documentation, file storage and benchmarking for future projects. Check it out here.
I also offer these design services.
