Design Goes Beyond Deliverables.

Crafting great products is not a simple, stepwise process of techniques and methods.

Greatness is a messy endeavor, full of surprises, false starts, happy accidents and exciting surprises.

Great designers are pioneers, venturing into new frontiers, confronting the unknown with their experience, talent and creativity. Successfully navigating the terrain of product design requires flexibility, curiosity and grit.

But when confronting the unknown, it certainly helps to bring a thorough and diverse utility belt.

Welcome to MY utility belt.

Understanding problems. Understanding people. Understanding environments. Understanding current solutions. 

Understanding whether a problem is even worth solving, or if it's even the correct problem to solve.

Understanding helps us to solve problems in better ways. And that's what design is all about.

User Research

Whether it's market research, ethnography, interviews, surveys, diary studies or card sorting, activities that help to develop an understanding of your users (how they think, how they work, their motivations and their activities) will not only help to validate concepts, but also generate new design concepts.

Testing

Usability testing, message testing, false door experiments, design prototyping, cognitive walkthroughs... There are many methods for analyzing the viability of design concepts or the efficacy of shipped products. It's not enough to gather feedback from teammates and stakeholders. To truly succeed, you have to put your designs to the test.

Analytics

Moving past the conceptual, beyond the prototypical, analytics grant understanding of the real. By analyzing usage, developing funnels/goals and continually reviewing product performance, you can ensure that your designs are having the desired impact, or determine whether or not your work is yet finished.

Product design goes beyond platforms, transcends patterns and encompasses far more than wireframes and mockups.

From the specific details of interactions within individual controls to an entire ecosystem of workflows and behaviors within a product, excellent product design contemplates and manifests the entire experiential landscape of a system.

Designing products requires deep understanding of many disciplines and technologies.

Workflow

Architecting the flow of tasks throughout a system requires perspective, creativity and logical flexibility. Understanding what tasks to expose, when to expose them and how best to communicate the concepts within them can easily spell success or failure for a product. Finding the best recipe requires open mindedness in exploration and a proclivity for tangential thinking. Designing workflow is one of my favorite challenges in any product, as it combines a multitude of disciplines and requires deep creative exploration.

Interactions

Small feedback mechanisms to give users confidence in their actions, animations that communicate status and intent, controls that clarify their function and purpose... All of these elements contain the details of interaction design, which takes the tasks defined in a workflow and enable users to digest the concepts and map it to their mental model. Whether time savings and efficiency are key, or fun and delight, the challenges within interaction design are always plentiful and fascinating.

Mobile Patterns

Combining digital design with elements of industrial design, mobile design unleashes the creative potential of a designer and allows for innovations impossible on other input sources. The challenges of platform standards, limited real-estate and performance constraints make mobile design the most exciting and challenging frontier. And, if successful, you can also have a large impact on user's lives than ever before.

Web Patterns

As the previous frontier and still the wildest, designing products for the web offers unique challenges. Driven by both technical limitations and unique capabilities, with enormous platform flexibility driving cross browser peculiarities, web products can be a difficult beast to tame. Demonstrating familiarity with plentiful technical capabilities and design trends is critical in order to stay competitive and relevant. While my strongest love is in mobile design, web design and development will always be in my heart and mind, in order to maintain that relevancy.

Desktop Patterns

The slow moving juggernaut of the tech world, the desktop may be on the decline but it's certainly not dead. Capable of processing and workflows impossible on a mobile device or the web, the desktop is home to creative product powerhouses that would cripple other technologies. Knowledge of the intricacies of desktop design patterns, both Windows and Mac, is increasingly rare with each year - but no less critical to teams tackling incredibly intense product problems. I got my start designing desktop apps and don't expect my knowledge to lose its intense value in the near future.

It's one thing to be able to say "The product should look great!" It's another thing to show what great looks like.

Taking a product from concept to delivery requires getting your hands dirty. Eventually you have to move beyond the sketchpad and get down in the pixels.

Asset Creation

A single mobile app can have hundreds of assets. A desktop app, thousands. Developing an efficient and flexible workflow for creating and exporting app assets in a usable form has been a large focus throughout my career. I pride myself on my ability to design and deliver functional assets faster than most, across any number of platforms, at any size and with lightning fast iterations.

Logo & Icon Creation

I believe an icon sets the stage and tone for an app. Creating icons and logos is a particular type of design challenge that requires planning, experimentation, plentiful feedback and testing and a fiendish commitment and attention to detail. Great app icons communicate the quality and trustworthiness of the product and team behind it. That is my mission, with every logo or icon I create.

Smaller teams require larger efforts. Whether you're testing a concept or to rapidly shipping new functionality or messaging, a designer that knows the nuts and bolts of shipping code can help you accelerate your development significantly. And shipping faster means learning faster, iterating faster, improving faster and succeeding faster.

Your competition's designer probably can't do that. And if they can, then yours certainly should.

HTML, CSS, Javascript

From marketing pages to web apps, with frameworks or without, having a knowledge of the elements of web development enable me to rapidly test product concepts or marketing efforts and to ship product and website updates faster than if I were simply delivering mockups. With the advent of responsive web design, creating mockups is also no longer an effective way to design websites or communicate responsive behavior.

C#, XAML, .NET

While specialized software developers may be faster at developing the back-end, I bring an attention to detail that only a designer can offer for the front-end. As a designer, I've found that personally developing UI for WPF Windows applications is a sure way to vastly accelerate the velocity of any Windows desktop development team.