You can think of a UX professional like a chef. There are a lot of similarities, including the fact that there is absolutely no “best chef in the world.” To keep the metaphor going, the quality of the chef is strongly relative to the cooking methods, the ingredients, the people who will eat (and their culture, socio-economic status, dietary habits, etc.) and most importantly, the quality of the kitchen equipment and the supporting cast.
– Gabriel Kneisley

When I was doing research for my book How to Get a UX Design Job, I happened across the quote above. In it, Gabriel Kneisley (who I’ve never met and may be horrified to see me quoting him here) compared UX designers to chefs. This really resonated with me.

   What’s in our mystery basket this episode?

We all do our best to work with the ingredients, tools, people’s preferences, and constraints that we’re given. Sometimes a design project feels like an episode of Chopped, where we’re given 30 minutes to make something “delightful” out of dried fermented scallops, risotto, and gummy bears.

So when people ask about my design process, the answer is of course “it depends.” Ideally, we’ll get a chance to design things right – we’ll do upfront discovery work that includes a lot of user and stakeholder interviews. We’ll have great personas we can leverage (or we’ll create some). We’ll do competitive and comparative research. We’ll write user scenarios. We’ll figure out the ideal user and task flows, and map them to what screens and patterns we need to create.

Then we’ll sketch, wireframe, prototype. We’ll get real users to test our designs and we’ll iterate accordingly, sometimes across 2 or 3 rounds of testing.

We’ll have a design system to pull from so that we can focus on the fun meaty design challenges, versus reinventing table pagination.

We’ll document everything comprehensively for the dev team and have time to answer their questions and review the implementation. Maybe we’ll even have a little time to do some A/B testing, or review metrics and see how things are going.

When the process doesn’t play out like this (about 99% of the time), then we need to know how and what to prioritize to still pull off a good design solution with the limited time, budget, and/or resources. We need to pick our battles. We need to know when to compromise. This is where experience really comes in handy.

One thing I don’t skimp on is user research, no matter what the project is or my role on it. I do research even when I’m not paid to do research. I want to understand the person who will be using the product that I design. That’s really the only way I’m going to be successful.

Here are some examples of UX deliverables I’ve created over the years. This page is not meant to replace my actual portfolio (email me to request a PDF version with fresh case studies), it’s just meant to highlight my work experience.

Discover

The Discover phase is all about research.

I read everything I can get my hands on about the project and study the target audience to understand what they’re all about.

Some of my research methods include:

  • Contextual interviews
  • Stakeholder interviews
  • Heuristic reviews
  • Site/app audits
  • Competitor audits
  • Comparator audits
  • Surveys

From there, I often create personas and user scenarios to help me and the rest of the team envision who we’re designing for.

In 2014, I consulted with X-Rite/Pantone on their web redesign planning. To help us all understand their customers and how/why they used X-Rite/Pantone’s products and websites, I created a set of personas based on different roles across the color workflow process (Inspiration > Design > Pre-Production > Production). I identified four primary personas, each with different “flavors” under them. 

I didn’t have direct access to customers, so I created these ad-hoc personas from a variety of input sources: stakeholders, internal customer advocates (i.e. X-Rite support team), metrics, X-Rite & Pantone websites, sales & marketing materials, previous work by other agencies, and in-depth research of the various workflows and roles within them.

Define

The Define phase is where I organize everything. (This is the Post-it Notes phase. ;))

I leverage what was learned from research and use additional methods like card sorting to understand how the user would organize and name the content.

I create things (often collaboratively with others) like:

  • Storyboards
  • User flows
  • Task flows
  • Journey maps
  • Site maps

In 2014, I worked with Ally Financial to create a website for its new suite of vehicle service contract (VSC) products. The site had to support both transitioning dealers and new dealers, and integrate into Ally’s existing dealer storefront.

My role on the project was Information Architect/Interaction Designer. I worked collaboratively with another IA/IxD, a content strategist, a user researcher, and a visual designer. Inspired by our user research, we came up with the idea of the “5-Minute Experience” during a storyboard sketch session, and we used that as our guiding principle throughout the rest of the design process. Sketching was a critical component of our design process.

(Most of our actual drawing was done by the very rad Ant Sanders)

In the UI/UX Design Certificate Program I taught at Boulder Digital Arts in 2017 and 2018, students came to the class with a project idea of their choice. We worked collaboratively on each student’s project, like a real-world UX team would, and used methods like card sorting and user/task flows to help determine what screens needed to be built. 

Design

In the Design phase, I sketch out ideas, prototype, and test in an iterative fashion.

Sketching

Sketching is done on paper, whiteboards, or the proverbial napkin.

Wireframing/Prototyping

I define a wireframe to be a flat representation of a screen (like a PDF – often in grayscale and with image and content placeholders) and a prototype to be an interactive series of screens (or dynamic actions on one screen). I use the words interchangeably out of years of habit, but pretty much everything I produce these days is a high-fidelity interactive prototype.

Usability Testing

Whether it’s informally asking people (preferably users, but proxies will do in a pinch) for feedback on my designs, formal usability testing in a lab, or something in between, iterative testing is critical to the process.

Endpoint security product design, 2019. My interactive prototype designs on the left (used to socialize ideas with stakeholders, keep Product Management updated on progress, and provide guidance to the dev team) and the final visual designs (produced by a visual designer colleague) on the right. 

Class/workshop management app design, 2017. My interactive prototype design doubled as the final visual design.

Deploy

In the Deploy phase, I am often handing off specs and design assets to a development team. I also help create/update style guides and pattern guides when appropriate.

An example of interaction design specs I created for a recent project.

Measure

After the product has launched, I am sometimes involved during the Measure stage (I love it when I am). During this phase, I study analytics to see what’s working and what’s not, and provide recommendations for how to improve conversion rates. Sometimes A/B testing is involved.

I built the website for my husband’s business, Halftime Dogs, in WordPress, and track his visitors in Google Analytics almost every day. 

If you’d like to chat with me about anything you’ve seen here, drop me a line at lisamurnan@gmail.com.

You can also download my resume or request a PDF copy of my portfolio.