Product Development & User-experience Professional

Thank you for your consideration of me as a professional product developer. I want to be a part of your product development solution. With over two decades of practical experience in industrial design, user-experience, prototyping, and visual graphics, I also bring studio personnel mentoring and management, and positive customer relations. My nature is collaborative, always seeking out the positive intent for solutions with people I work with. Below is a sample of a few of my favorite projects both as a studio head and individual contributor. Please contact me and let me know how I might help your organization's product development needs, I look forward to hearing from you.

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My Approach

I thought it might be valuable for you to know how I approach product programs in a general brief overview. This is useful if you are new to product development and want to understand first steps. And for those experienced prospectors, I'm sure you'll find like-minded ideas here as I define project objectives through user-experience (UX) goals.

Preliminary UX Research

People are the number one concern as designers think about who they're designing for as well as who they're working with towards the end goal. The first steps are:

A. Understanding use-case

​Consider the end-user's typical use-case scenario first. How is the task currently done? Who does it, skills involved, environment, and general attitude to tasks. It's amazing how initial thoughts about a product change after even a brief analysis of the use-case scenarios involved.

B. Identifying needs

From the above, identify the definite pain points experienced with the current use-case scenarios. That means finding the passionate "why" for a product based solution. There might be one major reason or several for the product feature needs. In some development programs this may necessitate some live ethnographic study. Whatever the case, this is where we want to identify desired product features from this and the use-case analysis. 

C. Researching solutions

Find out the improvised solutions users of the current tasks are doing to solve their use-case problems. What are the evident intuitive solutions? What is the competition doing? It is so surprising to realize what solutions already exist for a task's user difficulty (when they do) and how an integrated product solution might affect the global user paradigm. 

Principal Design Strategy

After understanding the use-case, identifying the user needs, and researching the feature solutions for the product in the first phase, it's time for principal industrial design and engineering to commence. This Phase 2 lines up to what is generally called the engineering validation test (EVT) phase. I have a habit of simplifying ideas in three segments, so here we go:

Compile the ABCs

This is the first step in documenting principal design efforts. The deeper the homework done on the ABCs stated in Preliminary UX Research the better clarity designers get about the necessary features and their required performance for the end-user. Listing feature specifications can be drafted alongside a possible market requirements document (MRD). This  documentation will be used as a standard to validate concept results. Without its reference the project could drift off course.

Concept development

In this second step, the UX objectives from our compilation of ABCs are instilled into the design execution. Teams brainstorm and visualize innovative features, new design languages, and determine a schedule for any additional technical/human factors research, design, and prototype testing. Depending on the complexity or inventive step required, this could involve a number iterations as 'unknowns' are discovered. New discoveries may be cause for designers to pivot on feature specifications. When this occurs it is always necessary to..

Concept validation

..make a validation step as feature design matures. Design teams should consider scheduled pauses for a project validation review. This isn't so much a third step as these checks happen throughout Principal Design. Reviewing the latest concepts against the ABC specifications compiled in the first step gives the team a chance to rectify any feature designs wandering from original intent. Or a chance to revise specifications to align with limits realized during prototype testing. 

General Objectives

As a product development professional, my general objective is to generate a useful product that results in a high 'delight factor' for the end-user. Despite all efforts to create the best innovative product, if the end-user becomes confused or frustrated enough to regret their product, then my responsibility to please the end-user has been missed. No one can please all people all of the time, however, that shouldn't be product developer's goal. Therefore, my overriding philosophy is seeking happy product users from most of the market for whom we are designing for.