Putting the ‘U’ back into UX

Guiding the development of experiences and interfaces through digital design best practices.

STRATEGY

Requirements Gathering and Discovery

The first step in any digital endeavor is to question “why are we doing this?“. Answering this requires a combination of stakeholder and end user discovery and research to uncover not just what everyone thinks they need but why they are doing it, what pain points they have, and what they are hoping to achieve.

Only after understanding is reached should the process kick into high gear or you may be hurtling at top speed in the wrong direction.


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INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

IA Design and Sitemaps

Getting a handle on what features and content are most relevant and useful to end users can help establish hierarchy and a natural organizational flow which is both intuitive and rewarding.



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This corporate site redesign required an assessment of pre-existing content so that we could identify areas to remove and expand.


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This kiosk experience sought to bundle related information and multimedia assets for users to navigate via a touch-screen wall at tradeshows.


USER EXPERIENCE

UX Design and Wireframing

Identifying the key elements and activities that take place on a component or page level establishes the building blocks needed to construct cohesive user experiences. Establishing and iterating on these can help save copious time spent developing unneeded features. I prefer to design User Flows and UX/UI Mockups and wireframes using Figma, though I’ve also used Adobe Photoshop and Adobe XD.


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United Healthcare needed a way to deploy casual games to their medicare supplement subscribers via web and mobile apps.  This was one of the diagrams I created to clarify how the user journey will flow.


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A major financial institution needed a responsive modular design system that provided a suite of unique content components as well as a way to deploy a corporate podcast that they were launching.


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Minnesota Community Care needed a way to guide visitors to the content that mattered most to them.  These landing page UX wireframes were just one of the ways I helped ensure this.


LEARNING BY DOING

UX Prototyping

The first clickable version of an interface doesn’t necessarily have to be fully developed and integrated with APIs. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be digital. From paper-based exploration to clickable prototypes in Adobe XD, Figma, or Axure, giving users a way to evaluate an experience helps to ensure that assumptions and decisions are on track and useful.


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This interactive product microsite was built to work both online and at trade shows.  It contained a mixture of 3d demos, interactive simulations and eLearning content.  This prototype helped us share and evaluate the UX before development.


Product Demo UX Prototype

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This WCAG 2.0-compliant accessible trivia game we built for UHC.  While the end product allowed vision-impaired users to play with screen reader and keyboard only, this early prototype gave us a good understanding of how mouse-users would navigate the game experience and screens.


Trivia Game UX Prototype

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This application was originally intended to give users an AR experience while riding the light rail train. This early prototype allowed us to evaluate how difficult it would be to find a location and calibrate the app to allow the user to experience the art.


AR Moving Art Gallery UX Prototype

USER INTERFACE

UI Design Mockups

Enhancing UX elements of branding, layout and color help reinforce hierarchy and context for users and reinforce expected patterns with a visually appealing system of navigation, interaction, and content consumption on both desktop and mobile devices.


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The Minnesota chapter of the ACNM needed a new look for their WordPress CMS website that better reflected their mission and values..


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Minnesota Community Care sought to modernize the branded impact of a local nonprofit network of medical clinics by redesigning their WordPress CMS website.


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The Touch of Sound is a global network of audio enthusiasts that share location-based sounds from around the world as a way of immersing users in the sonic texture of cities, nature, and oceans.


GET IN TOUCH

Contact

If you are interested in learning more or working together, please use the form to reach me via email.

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