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February 12, 2019
11. Design System

When your team’s product is coded and in production, especially if it is part of a potential suite of products or may have a life that involves revisions or updates over years, you will want to create a Design System. Design Systems have been around for many decades as style guides but in the digital […]

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January 29, 2019
10. Visual Design

The graphic designer should be brought in at some point prior to the wireframing step in order to discuss the parameters that they will use to craft the colors, shapes, type and layout style prior to being handed the final wireframes to “make pretty”. A good visual designer is worth their weight in silicon and […]

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January 29, 2019
9. Testing

When you have your wireframes built, you should put the into a prototype format. There are dozens of programs out there that will take what you’ve drawn and link them to other pages or layers to give the illusion of a fully functioning site. This is typically the job of the researcher, to gather some […]

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January 29, 2019
8. Wireframing

This is where you start to take all the data you’ve collected, along with the functional requirements from product management and technical constraints from development and put it all into visual form. Wireframing, for those who don’t know, is a rudimentary (low-fidelity), layout of the pages and interactions of your potential site. During wireframing, you […]

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January 29, 2019
7. Interaction Design

This is a less-well-known skill but certainly important in some circumstances. An interaction designer understands, intimately, exactly what users click or tap on, what happens afterwards (or during) and what this means. Animations and feedback can be subtle  but important to the journey users take, for one example.

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January 29, 2019
6. Information Architecture

A crucial step that can be done parallel to research since you employ similar tactics, IA is the foundation of how you present your product/service to the world in a way that your users understand. Card-sorting is one tactical process for sorting out your IA, where a user (existing customer or prospective customer) takes high-level […]

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January 28, 2019
5. Define - Refine

At this juncture, you should have enough information to define and refine what the team thought the problem or solution was in the Discovery phase. Some teams attempt to define before doing research and some interviews but in my experience this is premature without the qualitative research in front of you. If you haven’t done […]

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January 28, 2019
4. Personas

The work-product of user interviews, a persona is a visual representation of the data you collected on either a user specifically or a user group that falls in to a specific category of users. There are two distinct uses for personas in my experience - the making of the persona itself will reveal all the […]

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January 28, 2019
3. User Interviews

In-person user interviews (find actual customers if you have them). There’s nothing like a real conversation to elicit insights about what you do/make that you never would understand without them.

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January 28, 2019
2. Research

Understanding your user/customer/audience is crucial at the incept of your project. All decisions that are user-centered will cascade from the qualitative and quantitative data you collect during your research. I've called this section "research" in the abstract because user research is one part of the landscape. We can Ethnographic research, competitor research, historical data research, […]

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Alec Uitti

A UX practitioner with over 20 years of experience building UI, being a team member and managing teams in both San Francisco and the Colorado front range. Working with a wide variety of companies and organizations as contractor and staff.