About me
I am a product designer currently based in San Francisco. I believe that good design requires the incisiveness of science and the world-shaping aspirations of art, and I create experiences with those principles.
I graduated from Stanford having completed coursework in HCI, but I uncovered a passion for design ever since a program at the d.school, the institutional epicenter of IDEO's brand of design thinking, had me focused on using ethnographic techniques to truly understand users or audiences well enough to craft fitting solutions.
My Design Process
While recognizing that different situations and challenges call for an appropriate approach, here is my general approach to solving design challenges. This is a buildable process, with each phase forming the foundation for the next.
Investigation
I first attempt the understand the context of the problem through domain research, competitive analysis, and understanding how stakeholders view the problem. This perspective both makes it easier to capture nuances from user research and present findings in a way that resonates with the team.
User Research
Visualizing and understanding real people and their goals is the most important contributor to any design. Depending on the scope of the problem, this can involve techniques like interviews, surveys, contextual inquiry, or ethnography. The goal may be as narrow as understanding a particular usability issue, or as broad and exciting as discovering an unmet need.
Synthesis
I distill actionable insights from the research, forming a coherent foundation for user-centric design decisions for myself and a compelling narrative for others to follow. This may involve creating personas, storyboarding, task analysis, empathy mapping, etc.
Prototyping & Testing
After coming up with diverse approaches, the essential functions of a solution are tested in the lowest fidelity that makes sense, repeating as many times as necessary for the research objective. These are clickable wireframes, paper prototypes, Wizard of Oz tests.
Hi-Fi Solution & Testing
Finally, I create a hi-fi solution out of the lo-fi prototypes. This sometimes means creating an entire visual design system as well. Here, the goals are usability (does the visual hierarchy succeed?) and scalability (can designers and engineers use these components for future applications?). And of course, craft! These designs are tested to catch any usability issues.
Building and Impact Analysis
Thought frequently omitted, effective ongoing collaboration with the people who will build the design is highly important. After all, users will only get the experience that is actually delivered. Here, there are always tradeoffs in implementation complexity and emergent states. It's important as the designer to be an advocate for the aspects are most important to the user and open to alternatives for those that are not. And finally, I also ensure that the design includes mechanisms for collecting macro-feedback if possible—for example, meaningful analytics.