Thanks for stopping in.
Visual design is my strength, and I’ll be the first to admit that. Don’t get it twisted, though… that doesn’t mean I’m a visual designer. I consider myself an experience designer who can simply see his ideas through to delivery.
User experience isn’t just what something looks like and it’s not just digital. It’s about understanding your users through an empathetic lens, and being able to provide solutions for their needs while ensuring business goals are met. All user experiences need to be usable, useful and convenient.
I’ve been in the design industry for almost 20 years (whew, time flies). I believe I matured as a designer once I truly immersed myself in user research and usability testing. Research and design go hand-in-hand. Without research, how can a designer understand business goals and the users they’re creating experiences for?
The first half of my career, I focused more on branding, creative & marketing. I’m thankful for that part of my journey because of the role those things can play in an end-to-end experience. When does a user interact with a brand? Where are there opportunities in their journey for certain communications?
So without giving myself a label – I’d say I’m a user experience designer who’s comfortable wearing any hat, but the hat I wear best is my visual design hat. I’ve traveled around the globe doing research – from contextual inquiries, to user interviews, then synthesized, grouped and themed it in order to share out and summarize. I’ve built design artifacts like personas, journey maps and service blueprints. I’ve created functional wireframes, but also enjoy sketching out ideas on a piece of paper. Oh, and I’m pretty comfortable building out end-to-end workflows through low and high fidelity prototypes.
Design is iterative and there’s always a better way — and that’s OK. The better way can always be discovered through research and understanding of users.
Thanks for reading.
