My Process
Inspiration
Books
- The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper
- About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper
- The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
- Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald Norman
- Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug (Yeah, I Went There)
- Set Phasers on Stun: And Other True Tales of Design, Technology, and Human Error by Steven Casey
Blogs
- CommaDot.com This is the blog of my former boss and teacher, Glen Lipka.
- Luke W Design One of my favorite blogs by a UX master
- Smashing Magazine A fun website with lots of info on UX, Visual, and Graphic Design.
- 52 Weeks of UX A thought-provoking UX blog
- 90% of everything Usability blog
- A List Apart One of my favorite UX blogs
- Disambiguity A very thorough UX blog
- Konigi An entertaining design blog
- UX Booth Another UX blog I browse occasionally
Planning and Research
This is a chart (pdf) of what the design process is technically like with larger companies. I’ll keep it more simple though.
Depending on the situation some initial research is necessary to determine current problems before design planning is initiated.
These are some of the tools I use:
-Research
- Usabilla Great usability research tool
- Crazy Egg Another useful research tool
- Google Analytics
- Google Web Optimizer
- I’ve also conducted live target user research through 3rd party companies.
-Wireframing
- OmniGraffle
- Axure I’ve also used this for prototyping and demos
- Fireworks
- Balsamiq Mockups
- Cacoo
-Wirefrming and Mockup Examples
- Mockup showing different windows (Fireworks)
- Interaction flow example #1 created in OmniGraffle (pdf)
- Interaction flow example #2 created in OmniGraffle (pdf)
- Interaction flow example using personas created in Axure
- Wireframe of a modal created in Balsamiq Mockups
- Wireframe of an interface created in Balsamiq Mockups
- Prototype of a modal created in Axure