Approach

Truly innovative solutions require a balance of desirability, feasibility and viability. The design process begins with understanding what is desirable from a human point of view, and marries this with what is technologically feasible and economically viable.

Extreme users provide inspiration through their hacks and unique relationship to a design challenge that help to inspire ideas fit for a broader audience.

What people say and what they do are often different. For this reason, I advocate for not only interviewing people, but also observing them at work and at play and interacting with prototypes.

I work between the concrete and abstract and in both divergent and convergent modes to quickly iterate, test and validate insights and solutions.

Capture needs, motivations, and painpoints of the individuals and groups impacted by products and services.

An articulation of the benefits customers receive from products and services. Tease out which elements are of high value or low value in people’s lives.

Experiential prototype evaluations to understand how a service fits into people's lives and meets them in their routine. Try to get as close as you can to the real experience.

Remote unmoderated studies with a combination of probing questions in situ, assigned tasks, and feedback prompts to understand how people are currently behaving or solving for a need.

Snippets of an experience made quickly to simulate key aspects of a service and help answer specific questions (both in the process of making and through testing).

The comic book or film strip presentation helps distill the product or service before, during, and after deployment to demonstrate the core functionality and how needs are fulfilled.

Deep immersion, co-locating with customers as they live, work, shop, etc. to observe a need or uptake.

Conduct a study to determine product/market fit and confirm the right combination of features and benefits.

A technique to generate innovative ideas and new-to-the-world solutions that are grounded in user needs while also building team enthusiasm and collaboration.

A document that captures the qualities desired in a research participant. Recruitment may represent a sampling of people who encompass different geographies and lifestyles to understand how we should position a service or determine what needs we should prioritize solving for.

Captures the learning goals and questions to orient the research and project plan. It encompasses, what we think we know, what we want to learn more about, and ways we can approach our learning goals. The research plan includes the learning goals, methods & activities, profiles for recruiting, and discussion guide.

Captures the value promise for end users with a pithy caption and key visual that can be launched online to gauge interest with a target audience. Can be used to compare which value prop performs best in a given market or identify the audience whom responds best to a given value prop.

Conduct a focus group to probe if people would use a product, how they would use it, and why or why not. Promote or host a relevant live event to gauge interest.

Moving from mockups to transactions with customers to understand and learn whether assumptions hold. Explore how and when participants want to pay with comparisons to mainstream examples.

Rapidly prototype and test “Minimum Lovable Experiences” with market. The process of making helps explore the possibilities and the outcome serves as a shared understanding of what the product is and serves as an asset for research and testing.

Analyze behavioral cues and identify interesting patterns for further research.

The lowest fidelity format to capture the essence of a concept, focusing on the potential value created by a solution. Prototyping forces tangibility to validate strategic direction and can help push the thinking of research participants.

Captures the intended appeal of a product or service through the articulation of a website home page. Test the value promise with users in design research activities or by launching online.

Understand how they value the service, when is most advantageous to charge (pay at point-of-sale or upgrade) and how they would want it to show up in their customer journey.

Expresses a digital product with basic functionality to mimic the experience in a realistic context. Expresses a concept via a flow of screens with basic interactivity and motion design added through hotspots that mimic the behavior of interactive components.