As a design professional, I provide solid expertise in a broad-reaching competency defined as Experience Design. Experience Design goes beyond simply providing a pleasing ‘face’ of color and layout, but touches every aspect of interaction with the user. It’s not about simply designing the appearance, but rather designing the experience. I’ve been privileged to work with and learn from many talented and creative individuals; designers, innovators, technologists, experts.
Experience design includes, primarily, the following competencies:
- Information Architecture
- In an information age, content is the most valuable commodity. Designing the Information Architecture ensures that content is properly labeled and organized, allowing for both findability and usability. Understanding the needs of the target audience and the patterns of human research assist in designing logically organized content structures.
- Usability
- The primary notion of usability is that an application or site designed with a generalized users’ psychology and physiology in mind will be more efficient to use, taking less time to accomplish a particular task, easier to learn, and more satisfying to use. Through testing, research, and a knowledge base of human behavior, our usability experts can provide insight and design considerations that enhance the user’s experience and ensure a usable product.
- Interaction Design
- Closely identified with usability, Interaction Design involves both a high-level and very detailed plan of how a user will interact with a website or application. At times, the path of interaction is arbitrary, and defined by the user’s needs, and at other times it is planned to lead the user through a series of tasks to accomplish a desired goal. Interaction Design is often overlooked in application development, however I take special care in planning for a positive, profitable experience.
- Accessibility
- In computer interface terms, this is the ability to access information and services, primarily for the disabled user. In many countries this has led to initiatives, laws and regulations that aim toward providing universal access to the internet, programs and applications. Designing for accessibility is an area of expertise that comes with a deep level understanding of user needs and regulatory guidelines. It involves the visual considerations of the interface as well as the code used to program them.
- Visual Design
- Successful design is more than just pleasing color palettes and proper font choices. It is understanding the personality of the brand, the needs of the user, the constraints of the delivery medium, current trends and user behaviors. It is making visual considerations in interface graphics, typography and layout that will best aid the success of the product. While visual designers are plentiful, having the talent, competency and disciplines to provide exceptional design that wins is critical. I have become adept at bringing the client vision into reality through a systematic approach:
- Understand
- Ideate
- Design
- Deliver
- Evaluate
This approach allows us to gain a full understanding of our client’s needs and to arrive at, and deliver, the best visual solution.
- HTML development and style
- Standards-based programming for the User Interface is a necessary portion of web-delivered media that involves well designed code and file structure. This helps to provide longevity of product, as well as ease of maintenance.
- Multimedia
- Ranging from the design of audio and video to interactive presentation, multimedia provides a rich experience to the user.