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.