PREPARATION
Since I joined the industry in 2015, I have worked to grow my communication skills, both with clients and my own team. My strength is in facilitating the conversation between clients who have low technical knowledge of web design or UI/UX design and a development team who often doesn’t have the capacity to take in large amounts of information on how our clients do business or interact with their own customers.
When I begin a project, communication with the client is always the starting point. We meet and discuss things like timelines, scope, and expectations. I always try to push clients to think about their desired audience vs their current audience, as well as their goal for the project vs what they feel their site is doing currently.
PRODUCTION
My role then moves to research and auditing current content. Often that means looking at peers and competitors, creating helpful documents for the client like personas, user journeys, or affinity maps, and generally brainstorming and sketching ideas with my team. I enjoy this process of finding a design’s natural scope and shape through research and experimentation.
As I become more sure of the shape of our design, I then move to using tools like Adobe XD to create wireframes and mockups, which are presented to and discussed with the client iteratively. As those are approved, I source any needed assets and copy along with our project manager. When the design is ready, we present to the client and can make adjustments
INSIGHT
My career has taken me from working with a small start-up through to a huge corporation. I have had experience in most aspects of the design process, including designing mailers and packaging for print, editing video, shooting product and location photography, managing small WordPress sites on my own, and working as part of a larger team to design and collaboratively complete web projects.
In a larger team, I can bring the insight and independence I gained from working with a small business, combined with the experience I have working directly with clients together. Often, I look back to the smaller projects I worked on early in my career with no team or safety net for inspiration in dealing with larger corporate issues now.