Discover
This is the world of concepting workshops, whiteboards, sketchbooks and simple prototypes. Below is an activity categorized sampling of the sort of projects I have had the pleasure of working on throughout the years.
Concepting
Some of the most interesting ideas have come on Post-its, or through workshops with engineering and product management teams. Creativity and ideas are everywhere. In the concept phase, fat sharpies and whiteboard markers are key.
Webtrends
Exploring customizable visualization concepts for a real-time analytics reporting engine. Ask me about ‘Pants In Space’.
Webtrends
Running a workshop with an Engineering team to come up with concepts for user administration.
Webtrends
The best ideas come over donuts. Working here with Product Management on an idea for the Campaign Streams visualization (see Create section).
New Relic
Not all discovery workshops are about a product. Here, I ran a team workshop to develop and improve on our design process.
Prototyping
Trying to explain how it works is never as valuable as actually making it try and work. Even if all you are using is paper, valuable insights are gleaned from testing interactions, screen transitions. It is also a very quick and cheap way to test with users.
Webtrends
Paper prototyping potential dashboard widget transition ideas.
Webtrends
Working with Product Management to test an idea for an A/B testing tool.
Sketching
Higher fidelity than a sharpie concept, but still quick enough that multiple versions and ideas can be explored with very little effort.
McAfee
I still love to begin playing with ideas in a sketchbook.
McAfee
Someone told me once that I draw very small. I call it space utilization. 🙂
McAfee
Sometimes the ideas are just workflow and system diagram ideas.