UX and UI Design
Designing a good experience is allowing your users to LOVE what you've created. And in order to do this a strong visual design is absolutely vital.
Visual design is one of the most powerful parts of an experience. It is the stage where you put a good design on top of a strong customer-centric foundation to form the intangible feelings people have toward a product; the kind of feelings that made people want the new iPhone before they even know what it does.
Wireframing & storyboarding
Creating concepts, drawing up storyboards and crafting rapid prototypes to depict a user journey helps to look at the experience in it’s entirety. It helps you to understand how different pieces of the puzzle are going to interact and play their part in the user's journey.
Designing using an iterative approach allows you to move towards continual improvements. This is particularly useful in agile (both upper case A and lower case a) projects where time can be limited within the sprint. A quick and dirty diagram of how something could work is often the most appropriate approach to articulate your design ideas.
I use a whiteboard or some kind of surface I can draw on in almost all of my projects and I don't quite feel at home until I've got somewhere I can sketch out a concept. All ideas are valid and the craziest ones are often the most fun!
Page designs & design systems
After storyboarding out a flow, it’s time to dive deep into each of the individual pages in the journey. The visual design of each page is what allows your users to build an emotional connection with the process.
Visual design is what can transform a bland transactional process into an experience that users will fall in love with. Establishing and following a design system is key so that there is consistency within flows and the brand can shine through in every aspect of user’s experiences.
Creating simple interfaces is often much harder than designing something complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s in that simplicity that you can really make something incredible.
Usability testing
Designs are created with the best of intentions, but it’s important to always validate and test your designs to uncover blockers or usability issues as early in the process as possible.
Usability testing can be performed at the storyboarding/prototyping phase before branding has been applied to validate the flows themselves, or later in the process to ensure there is no aspect of the visual design that has made the page’s purpose more complex or difficult.
There’s nothing to say that testing can’t be performed at both stages in varying degrees, and this is particularly relevant in fast-paced or Agile environemnts.