There’s no design without research
At least not in my opinion, we always need to know what and who we design for. Therefore I work with a magnificent team of researchers over at Concept7. Their research methods bring up all information we need to know about users and customers. Their goals and needs are carefully prioritized so we designers know what’s most critical and what’s less important to keep in mind during the design process.
Usually I’m part of the research team, I think it’s very important to do at least some research myself. It helps me get closer to the end-user of the product.
We start visualizing our ideas in a very early stadium, we do this by sketching and storyboarding. These sketches and storyboards help us see how people will use the product, in the end we need to help them accomplish their goals.
By doing research on people’s decision-making and their goals we can show a reason for every decision we make during our design process. It helps getting all team members on the same page and enhances team collaboration.
Visualizing ideas through sketching
During brainstorm sessions we try to generate as many ideas as possible, we’re not only talking quality here. The more ideas we generate, the better it is. Quantity is what we want, every bad idea can be a spark for someone else to come up with a new great one! By presenting the ideas to one another we get inspired to generate even more.
Once we’ve visualized all the ideas we can come up with, we need to select the best ideas from all the other good ideas. Our user and business requirements (design principles) can help us select these ideas. There’s also some gut feeling that helps me out here. During the 10 years I’ve been designing and researching I learned to know what works and what doesn’t in many situations.
Sketches become a prototype
Once we’ve selected all the greatest ideas we can start making sense of them by designing prototypes of the product. The combination of ideas will form the first sculptures of the real thing (end-product).
The lower fidelity the prototype is, the quicker we can produce them. The higher fidelity a prototype is, the more output we’ll get from the people we perform our tests with. There’s many tools I use to create prototypes and usually I decide per project which tool suits best.
I do a lot of drawing on paper (paper prototypes) but als prototyping in Fireworks, Visio works. There’s even software which is intended to be used to create prototypes like Axure RP Pro, this one I use most to create digital prototypes of websites.
