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What does design mean?
Design is on my mind. This is mostly driven by my extracurricular reading, currently “Thoughtful Interaction Design”; I just finished Saffer’s book: “Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices”. Also, I sift through numerous blogs daily that focus on user experience and design in general. At work, we have been talking about design and the meaning of user experience extensively over the last few months. Our conversations culminated in Chris’ Intro to UXD presentation for the local STC chapter. I attended the presentation and enjoyed the discussion afterwards. At one point during the discussion, I explained how to utilize design as an approach to tackle problems faced in creating a sound user experience. I found myself giving a rote answer: design is about solving problems using design thinking, user centered methodologies, and so forth...
Intro to UXD
On Saturday the 16th I gave a presentation, "Introduction to User Experience Design" to the Society for Technical Communication at Ktech in Albuquerque.
Client-Centric Documents
Documentation is produced for a number of reasons during the lifetime of a project. We use different documents to communicate the design vision and interaction to designers, developers and to our clients. We find value in documenting a project over simply diving in and programming, designing, writing, etc.
Clearwired Process Map
Over the last few months I have been working on refining our design and development process. After hours of internal discussion and brainstorming we determined that we wanted to combine the best of agile and user-centered design methodologies. We didn’t want to follow a strict waterfall pattern, flexibility in the choice of tools and extensive iteration with built in validation loops is extremely important to us. The process itself is based on our core belief that the foundation of an exceptional user experience is a strong understanding of our clients’ business and their customers. Our process is “deliverable-driven” allowing the solution to unfold one layer at a time. This provides our clients an opportunity to collaborate as the project proceeds.
As with any design and development process this is going to be our guide and it will be tailored for each engagement. Most importantly it’s an internal map for our projects which helps us communicate to our clients what they can expect working with us. Here’s the process map (version 1.0): ClearwiredProcess.pdf
Please note we moved this document to a new home: ClearwiredProcess.pdf
Deconstructed Wireframes
In our last newsletter I wrote about wireframes. I described what they are and how we use them. For the redesign of the Clearwired site, I decided it was time to revisit the Deconstructed Wireframe, or known as the "Layout-less" wireframes or page description. I wanted to use Deconstructed Wireframes, simply because I wanted to make sure we had absolute focus on the actual content of the page, it's hierarchy and overall importance, and not on the page layout.