Month: January 2015

I’ve done some freelance work and I really enjoyed it, but you don’t always get the opportunity to see things through to launch as a consultant. When you’re employed full-time in a UX role, you get to be part of the development team and are able to impact the product all the way through development to release. This level of continued involvement is what I have found to create the best-produced experiences. Here is my process for when I’ve been asked evaluate an existing project and manage the experience through to the new release of that product:

1. Data Collection
2. Product Review
3. Prioritization
4. UX/Heuristic Evaluation
5. Wireframing/Prototyping
6. Development

Continue reading “UX Evaluation for Existing Products”

There are benefits to both waterfall and agile methodologies. However, when it comes to creating phenomenal user experiences, waterfall cycles tend to come up short and here is why:

The user experience on paper can be VERY different from the user’s experience. There are often things that the researcher or business analyst might suggest that only address the symptom and not the issue, or the initial interaction design fails to address a major use-case, or the visual design detracts from the usability of the product in some way. All of the members of the team across all of the disciplines involved must work together to overcome these obstacles as they arise during the product development. Because, the truth is, you are never going to be able to account for every problem or scenario in the BRD that was written three months ago.

Continue reading “How does UX fit into software development?”