Successful products and services depend on good design, good designers and thoughtful and experienced design leadership.

There are many design diceplines that have a shared set of ideas and basic principles. From Graphic Design, Visual Design, to Industrial Design, Product Design, Interaction Design, User Experience, and more... In many cases the role of design and designers has become compartmentalized and divided up in to specialized sub fields in part due to designers and industry focus on individual skill-sets, experience, knowledge and expertise.

While there are many specializations in the design field, good design and user experience is focused on problem solving, defining the right products & services to meet real needs with distinct and compelling differentiation delivered in a way that truly captures the heart of it's audience. That being said, anyone involved in the ideation and delivery process can be considered designers no matter the individuals title or background.

I view good designers as holistic thinkers who have skill-sets and talents to first, understand and empathize with all aspects of the users and benefactors of the products and services. This includes understanding users wants, needs motivations, and contexts and understanding business, technical, and domain requirements and constraints. Then being able to communicate clearly with confidence both visually and verbally a vision that translates this knowledge into deliverables for products/services whose form, content, and behavior is useful, usable, and desirable, as well as economically viable and technically feasible.

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The most common definition of user experience is usually described as the characterization of what a user feels while interacting with a product or service. I like to think of it as a user’s relationship with a company’s brand.

I think of a brand as a promise comprised of three parts.

• One part expression:
  How a company expresses its promise to it’s customers.

• Two parts experience:
  How well a company meets that promise through the experience they deliver.

A great brand is able to demonstrate a high positive correlation between the brand expression and experience.

Usability:
How easy or difficult it is for a user to use/learn a system to achieve their goals.

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While there are many skill-sets that good designers utilize there are also a core set of principles that they understand and use to guide their decisions and evaluate their work.

• Visibility (How do you know what state an object is in?)
• Feedback (What tells you that your input has had an effect?)
• Affordances (Does the object look like what it does?)
• Mapping (How do you know which control operates what function?)
• Constraints (How do you know what you can and can not do?)
• Habituation / Breakdown (When you're using a system for the umpteenth time, how much effort does it take? What happens when something goes wrong?)

• Balance (visual equilibrium)
• Proportion (the relative size and scale of the various elements)
• Rhythm (timed movement through space)
• Emphasis (point of focus)
• Unity (coherence of the whole)

Waterfall

1. Defining the Problem/Opportunity
2. Research & Validation
3. Set Base Requirements
4. Discover & Explore Solutions
5. Prototype & Test Solutions
6. Spec
7. Build
8. Launch

Agile

1. Defining the Problem/Opportunity
2. Concept & Explore Solutions
3. Prototype
4. Validate Internally
5. Test Externally
6. Learn From User Behavior
7. Iterate