Experience Design Engineering — Rapid UX Prototyping
Design takes Passion for breakfast, Honesty for lunch, and Hard work for dinner. 😊 ~ Satish Velagapudi
Designing Ideas into Visual Realities
Every designer doesn’t aim to become a Jony Ive (Apple), Steve Jobs (Apple), or Elon Musk (Tesla) but we all are influenced by our role models and their work. No matter where the inspiration is, every designer should have a mindset to create meaningful and delightful experiences for users with their design.
Attitude is Everything: Visual or User Experience Designer of a product or a service
- Be Inquisitive — be genuinely interested in learning and knowing new things. Pay attention to the details and respectfully ask why. Avoid becoming irrelevant.
- Be Empathetic — always try to put yourself in others' shoes first. Do not look for what you want to hear but hear.
- Be Passionate — it is okay to take the design and deliverable to heart. Who knows you may change the world for good with it.
- Be Sensitive — do not be thick-skinned to change. Iterate as many times. Makes you be more responsible.
- Be Ready to fail — you may not hit the bullseye the first time. Do it like your life is on the line.
- Be Emotional — to your design but not to the people.
- Be Organised — write, prioritize, maintain a to-do list
- Be Vigilant — watch out for the point of no returns. Designers tend to complicate the journeys sometimes by mere overthinking or skewed choices — beauty over usability — looking good than feeling good
- Be Honest — what is there in the mind reflects in what is created. The more a designer is honest to the problem to be solved and to the requirement, the easy it gets to create the experiences. Do not stay in the safe zone and do the new. Ask ‘Wh’s (why, who, what) fearlessly.
- Be Aware — trends come and go. Great movements leave their impact. Be aware and be able to differentiate between a real movement and a fad. Reach out. Have conversations. Keep reading.
- Don’t forget the brief — it is easy to get carried away and forget where it all started
- Don’t take it personally — prepare yourself for more disagreements than agreements. Agree to disagree.
- Don’t forget to have fun — thoroughly enjoy the good around you, have joy in what you are creating. Do not take yourself too seriously
- Remember the timelines — yes, design is art and designers get moody like any artist. But, remember others are on the clock because of you.
- Remember change is constant — be it design tools, customer expectations, or your favorite people
- Remember to respect — be it your fellow designers, developers, or their design perspectives
- Remember to treat quality as a non-compromising obligation
Involve your client in the design process and treat the relationship like a partnership.
Here are a few ways to do this:
- Involve your client in the design process and treat the relationship like a partnership.
- Capture the executive intent and user goals
- Meet frequently and listen to build empathy and uncover useful information that didn’t make it into the brief
- Convert the listening into mental modals and visual artifacts
- Talk to end-users, if possible
- Story-tell the design solution using a clickable (make-belief application) prototype
- Do a user satisfaction survey
- Do a UX inspection post-development and keep client informed
- Continuously improve and stay relevant
People ignore design that ignores people. ~ Frank Chimero
Front and Centre — Digital Experience Creation — Experience Design Engineering
Engineers with a design mindset are key for extraordinary customer experiences.
A new mandate for comprehensive and continuous digital experiences has put a spotlight on designing products that meet customers’ expanding demands. Embedding customer experience into products and design is more important than ever.
OSI aligns product thinking with platform solutions expertise to deliver delightful customer experiences that are different by design.
Typical experience design engineering services include:
- Idea to market
- User experience strategy
- Platform and Solution management transformation
- Platform and Solution design and delivery
If you think a good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of a bad design. ~ Ralf Speth
Agile UX Services
- User Experience Design as a Service
- User research, usability testing
- A clickable-prototype based feedback system prior to building any piece of code
- Continuous attention to good design
Any product that needs a manual is broken. ~ Elon Musk
Agile UX Development
- Backlog grooming with UX stories
- Validating user stories with illustrations
- Usability testing with clickable prototypes
- User acceptance with visual comps
- Style guide for ongoing design support
How it is done — D5 Process
Discover
Understand product vision, Executive Intent, Business goals, Competitors & Target Audience behavior with product stakeholders
Define
User Research, Problem Statement, Task Flow Maps, Information Architecture, User Journeys
Design
Development Approach Decisions, Wireframes, Clickable Prototype, Usability Testing, Interactions Documentation, Detailed Design Spec Document and Artefacts
Develop
Development, Interactions/Micro-interactions development, Standards & compliances validation
Deploy
Managing CI/CD, daily tasks such as Configuration Management, Deployments, Release Management, and Monitoring
If it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful. ~ Joshua
Styles come and go. Good design is a language, not a style. ~ Massimo Vignelli
Rapid Prototyping
Rapid prototyping is an iterative approach to user interface design that includes prototyping, reviewing, and refinement stages. Designers move through each step and, when they reach the end, they return to the beginning (over and over again) until they have the result that satisfies initial expectations.
Why is rapid prototyping important?
- Communicate design decisions better. Easier to get feedback on design decisions if everyone can see how things might work with their own eyes.
- Save time by writing less documentation. Developers can use prototypes to understand how things work.
- Experiment with multiple approaches and ideas facilitating discussion through visuals
There is no such thing as a boring project. Only boring executions. ~ Irene Etzkorn
Technology Tools & Trends
- HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript-based mobile application development
- Applications built with a single codebase for mobile, web, and desktop
- Rapid Prototyping, UX/VX — Sketch, Adobe Photoshop, Sigma, Invision, Flutter, Axure, Marvel, Proto.IO, Adobe Creative Cloud
- Gaming Apps — Unity, GameMaker Studio, Unreal Engine, HTML5
- AR-VR Apps — ARCore, ARKit, Vuforia
- Design incorporating mobile native features — camera, audio/video, SMS, Geolocation/location ID, Maps, Contacts, Calendars, Push notifications, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Peripherals, IoT devices Control, Remote Access and Cloud Management.
Conclusion
OSI designs products, and services that deliver distinctly better customer experiences. We look beyond point solutions and apply design thinking to the creation of new strategies, complex ecosystems, and — in some cases — entirely new businesses. We are leading clients into the future by continuing to integrate new capabilities and platforms for strategic design like intelligent systems, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and adaptive environments.
We help you to rapidly drive value through extraordinary customer experiences, powered by integrated technology, digital innovation, and design.
User Experience Strategy
- Stakeholder Research
- Experience Standardization
- Digital Roadmap
User Experience Design
- Design Sprints
- Stakeholder Persona Research
- Stakeholder Journey Mapping
- UX / UI Design
In many ways design is akin to gardening: get rid of the weeds. If data is showing a feature has poor usage or unintentional consequences, kill it. ~ Didier Hilhorst
References
Content provided in this blog is for educational purposes only and is personal views. Any similarity with what you read before is purely coincidental. All trademarks, service marks, and company names used are the property of their respective owners. Images courtesy: stock.adobe.com.
