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.

Feedback Tools: ProdPad, Miro, PowerPoint, Zoom

Wireframes, Style Guides, Components

This work is currently done in Figma, 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.