I've been in the process of pivoting from Visual Design to UX Design for the past two years. I opened the door to UX at General Assembly and couldn't be happier that I did. I've met and worked with some very talented people. Take a moment to browse my work below, and see my process from start to finish.
THIS IS MY DESIGN PROCESS & MY FAVORITE ASPECTS OF THE PROCESS
From my experience the projects that went smoothly always kept true to the UX Design process noted below. Working alone you can just flow from one section to another. In a team environment you can effectively delegate tasks to team members. If there are any setbacks you can identify task you can expedite so you can keep to your original deadline.
Discover Phase
Sometimes you get a client that knows what the issue is that they need help with, and other times you need to get under the hood and take a good look around. In either case you need to do the research to back up all your work. One of my favorite aspects of the Design Process is the Discovery Phase. Here you get to do; Surveys, User Interviews, Affinity Diagrams, Competitor Analysis and User Testing to name a few processes. You get all the data to help find the pain points. It’s also more difficult for a client to say no to a solution when you can point to the mountains of research, and it makes the final Pitch less stressful.
Design Phase
I love the feeling of watching someone click through on a prototype. You get to experience the full gamut of emotions that an end user feels. Iterating from Low Fidelity prototypes until you solve for all your pain points. From which you build out a High Fidelity prototype. At the end of all these design iterations you have a shiny new user friendly website or mobile application.
HOW I DEFINE UX/DESIGN
I had an idea before I took any classes or researched into UX design, I believed you just built a website or an application from some idea you had floating around, sort of like on the movie the Social Network. With very little to no research as to who would need my site or mobile application. As it turns out, after having taken a course at General Assembly for User Design Immersive, you need to do a ton or work before you ever get to any code or open any design software. This was pretty eye opening. I would now define my process as; design backed by research.
APPS AND WEBSITES THAT I LOVE
In terms of pure information overload, Reddit.com has at least one hour of my day minimum. On mobile I use the Alien Blue application for Reddit. Even though Reddit offers a newer official app, I’m still with Alien Blue for the best UX experience.
Next I would say that the first time I used the Cash application to split a happy-hour check with friends, I felt like I was living in the future. When prompted to open something outside of the app, it gives you a choice between Safari and Chrome, the two browsers on my phone. It’s so simple, why hasn’t that been done in other apps?
And finally, Dribbble.com just makes me smile. You have something for everyone that loves art and design.
INFLUENCES
I’ve been following Razvan Vezeteu, Carlos del Barrio on Dribbble.com for their illustrations. My eye is just drawn to how they’ve taken something like a house, and broken it down to it’s simplest shapes and colors and make it jump off the screen.
For User Interface Design, I’ve been following Ramotion. Everything they do is just sooooo slick. It’s humbling to watch some of their prototypes in action. It’s a skill level that I try to reach with every project.
WHY SHOULD YOU HIRE ME
Even though my UX body of work is small at the moment. I believe it demonstrates all the necessary processes to build a successful mobile application or website. I’m currently looking for a great team to join, so drop me a line.
Design Tools
InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Adobe XD, Acrobat, Axure, OmniGraffle, Sketch, InVision & Flinto
Design Skills
User Research, Persona Creation, Heuristic Evaluation, Information Architecture, Sitemap, Storyboarding, Wire Framing, Prototyping & Usability Testing
rmrdesign@gmail.com
www.linkedin.com/in/itsramon