How I design
My roots in design
My PhD work was all about designing for a special kind of designers - end-user programmers. I had a lot of fun rummaging through decades of design research, gleaning treasures here and there. Some of the key pieces I savored and have found helpful throughout my design career include Donald Schön's reflective practice, especially the Reflection-in-Action model which describes how designers work and creativity literature's ideation concept.
My design processs
My central design process revolves around the ideate-prototype-test cycle.
- Ideate through brainstorming and sketching.
- Prototype in low- or high-fidelity.
- Test with users to learn their reactions to the design.
My role in the design process
I love the philosophy behind Participatory Design that design is a democratic process. I belief that users, stakeholders as well as everyone on the team needs a channel to express their opinions. The benefits are multitude. First, more minds, better ideas. The more ideas get considered, the better the final ideas would be. Second, the more ideas get produced and evaluated in a time period, the faster the design will converge. This always helps to speed things. Last but not least, people will automatically own the design because it's their ideas we are talking about, not a single person's.
Because of this, I see myself as a facilitator that glues the team together as we are working on a project. I begin by working with my team to understand project goals and plan user research with them closely. For example, you'd find my lead developer and I crafting a user interview guide in his office. Collaborating with my team, I also conduct research and analyze the data we gather so that when we get to the design phase, people trust the findings as well as understand its full context to be able to make design decisions about them. When we are in design land, I hold collaborative design sessions where we brainstorm ideas and draw interfaces. I also partner with my teams to test ideas as soon as we can whether it's grabbing somebody at the cafeteria to show a sketch or running full-fledged usability testing session with external customers in our lab.
Samples of my design process
All projects are different. I vary my design approach based on project needs and constraints. The following are some of the projects that contain flavors of the design process that I've described above. Please click on the individual projects to see what processes I used to tackle the design challenges I encountered.
| Project | Design process highlights | Design challenges |
|---|---|---|
| Pause MATLAB execution | Highly collaborative with many rounds of brainstorming, sketching, evaluating pros and cons of design options. | One interface for users with very different programming expertise. |
| Idea Garden | Designing to deliver relevant content at the right time through a non-intrusive communication style by leveraging users' motivation to complete their job. | How to design a system that teaches users whose primary goal isn't to learn? |