My Process
When I first started developing for the web I would sit down and just start coding. This led to many long hours and redesigns and eventually scraping the project. Over the years I have fell into a process that helps bring stucture and focus to my work. I found UX through Medium and went to a couple of meetup groups that talked about the subject. I found that my process that made since to me reflected some popular UX techniques. I have and will always be redefining my process, but planning and research are fundamental for me now. I like to use the following techniques for steering my design decisions.
- - Content Audit
- - Competitive Analysis
- - User Personas
- - Storyboarding
- - Moodboards
- - Wireframing
- - High fidelity prototyping
- - and of course testing
Adwords
We are in the process of testing multiple Google Ads for Crash Studios our sister company. I was asked to craft a campaign that would inform us where to spend our ad dollars for Crash in the future. My first step was to research current companies and find any related googleads. We wanted to test a couple of different formats so I split them into two categories, selling dreams and strict info. We offer a free first session and needed to include that in every add. Inside our categories we decided to test a general purpose ad and one for each of our specialties; photography studio, video production, and podcasting.
After 60 days, and minor tweaking, it seems that our photography ad is far outperforming the rest. I have set up Google Analytics for our website and next steps will be tuning our ad experience to drive Crashes business goals.
Email Signatures
One of my first task at Ritz was a responsive email signature. The problem was the current signature was breaking down after any reply and mobile was broken. I needed a signature that would stand up to redirects and replies while maintaining structure across all platforms and email clients. The design needed to include the business logo and a confidentiality agreement along with the normal information name, title, phone, as well as social links.
I wireframed some designs on a whiteboard, because of the simplicity of the signature I didn’t need do any prototyping. The best two designs were voted on by the creative team and presented to our company president. Our finalist then went through compliance testing through email on acid and then manuel testing though the top 5 email clients on the market. After the signature passed all of the testing requirements I made a master file of all of the employee signatures and used github as a repository for the file.
Ritz School
We are a five person team that is comprised of 3 graphic designers, 1 video and animation person, and me the designer/developer. We wanted to have weekly training sessions Ritz School for Kids Who Don't _____ good, was born. At our first stand up meeting we discussed formatting and content, and it was decided that I would be the first presenter and that we would discuss The internet of things and web development for a month. This was a great success. I started with how the internet works and detailed how info is sent and how your ISP works as well as web protocols. Week two was all about web pages and how they are built and hosted. Week three and four we took a deeper dive into web pages with HTML and CSS and JS.