Behind The Scenes of UX

This is the most insightful book I’ve ever read on how the human mind works, and I find it an absolutely essential UX reading. This book doesn’t contain the typical cognitive principles that we use in design, the ones you learn from Don Norman’s writing for example, but it talks about the science of decision making and dissects human’s cognitive biases and how they affect their choices. As designers, this should be an essential knowledge for us, because without understanding the shortcomings of human mind, we can’t predict the impact of the experiences we build.

“A scientific psychology should not only help us to understand our own human nature, it should help us in our practical affairs. In educating our children, it should help us to design environments for learning. In building airplanes, it should help us to design for safety and efficiency. In staffing for complex jobs, it should help us to discover both the special skills required and those who might have them.” 

Task oriented information architecture is a great way to prioritize UI elements in your product. To do that, find and abstract the “tasks” out of the interface and understand where in the user journey these tasks are relevant. In this example here the product is designed and evolved around two tasks “ Writing” and “Selecting items” 

This is a picture of an affinity diagramming I did as part of my job at DC where I helped iterate DC’ design thinking framework. This is how I mapped the organization’s current workflows, frameworks and tools and was able to identify and analyze problems. 

Reportin is an app that helps accounting teams collaborate on creating and managing financial reports in a better, faster and more reliable way. 

At Design Cofounders, I worked as the UX design lead for Reportin, an accounting app that helps accounting teams collaborate on creating and managing reports in a more reliable and easier way. In our initial kick-off meeting, it was important to understand how the app works, so I created a diagram that captured their model. 

Communicating a design model to developers can be challenging if you don’t speak the same language. This was a design session on The Writing Project with Olga Volkova at Design Cofounders. We both knew what a Tetris was, so we used that as our mental model for designing the inline editing experience in TWP. 

You don’t need a fancy prototyping tool to communicate your thoughts or work through a problem. Paper and pen is often the best tools...

Use elements of your physical environment as means of communication. Write things down, draw thumbnails, help your brain work on more important things than recalling information. 

Sticky notes can help you organize and see information in a different way. Information in linear format does not help you see missing links. So you need a tool to help you organize data in different dimensions and in flexible locations so you can rearrange and discover categories and missing links.  

There is a little joke with the “Design Thinking” model that Damien Newman originally illustrated and others followed. 

And there is the team all happy and engaged! 

To help your brain open up in creative ways, it’s important to create an environment for your work. I used the windows on my balcony to see how it feels to work in open air. It worked wonders! Try it :) 

Ryerson Zone Portal is designed and developed by Design Cofounders’ team.

This is a picture of a table in Design Cofounders that we use as a whiteboard, and that’s the first conceptual drawing I did as the designer for The Zone Portal, which was a project that Ryerson University commissioned Design Cofounders to design and develop. The entrepreneurial landscape in Ryerson has been growing exponentially over the past few years, but there was no one-stop for students to learn and connect to entrepreneurship resources and programs. After mapping this complex landscape it became clear what the funnel should do. The conceptual mapping gave us a design strategy and a direction for the user research so that we could validate and discover the content of the circle and the box.

Drawing is the most effective tool for communication. You can quickly convey the empathy you’ve gathered from your research without forcing people to read. Reading that leads to understanding requires more mental effort and attention than perceiving that leads to understanding. 

At Design Cofounders, for every step in the design, we look at opportunities and risks associated with that step. We look at opportunities from the business perspective and the risks from the user perspective. The actions that will be then translated into design help us make an objective decision that seizes the opportunities and alleviates risks.