My Toolbox

Here are some of my core tools.

Process & Scope

I live in a Dual Track Agile world where UX drives Discovery and Engineering drives Delivery. I describe effort in confectionary terms: cupcake, birthday cake, wedding cake. Each one gets a little bigger and more complex but at their core, they are all cake and icing. Users should get a great experience at any size and unlike ‘MVP’, a cupcake can stand alone.

If you really want to geek out, here is the full lifecycle of what is best done at what phase.

Gathering Feedback

Here is an extensive list of the touchpoints I use to insure all input is captured.

  • Product Council: a monthly meeting for executives and top stakeholders to sign off on road map.

  • UX Open House: a reoccurring sprint or weekly meeting where UX shares designs. Open to anyone in the company. Short meeting where we share designs in a very loose format to get buy-in and feedback.

  • UX/Dev Stand: once a Sprint, UX shares concepts with engineering to get technical feedback on the feasibility of design concepts.

  • User Feedback Portal: where all feedback from customers and end users filters into so that UX and Product can map them to ideas, future Initiatives, or features.

  • Account Management & Sales Check-ins: it is best for UX to occasionally attend customer / prospect meetings, but at minimum, UX should meet with the teams monthly for feedback.

  • Beta Testing: work with internal power-users (or customers) to validate production features on complex products and make sure they're working as designed before exposing them to the full user base.

  • User Testing: Depending on the complexity of the feature and functionality you are testing, you may need to pull in existing users or purposefully pull in people who do not know your product to test before you get to the development phase.

  • Best-Practice Research: Allows us to see what's out in the marketplace in your domain. Often we look outside our domain for parallel concepts that could lead to an innovative way of solving the problem.

  • Design Sprints: a great way to get stakeholders or those who could have input on a feature or initiative together and have a quick two to three day design session. It can be in person or remote.

  • Accessibility Validation: WCAG standards have been part of my work going back to level 1.0 in 2001. There are countless tools to ensure you deliver. No excuses.

Note: Every day there are new AI driven tools to help with each of these tasks. The key is constantly explore them and leverage them, but never forget, AI can do anything that has been done pretty well but it can’t do what has never been done. For true innovation, we humans need to know when to step in.

Feedback Tools: ProdPad, Miro, PowerPoint, Zoom

Wireframes, Style Guides, Components

I use AI when possible to get me started. At some point, the work needs to be my own. That work is currently done in Figma (and yes, they too have great AI features too), but I have used all the tools over my time comping ideas up and I am not above writing on the back of a napkin.