Category: Blogging

What is my process? – UX design

Posted on by ARSpaulding

I am a UX (user experience) designer by trade.  I’ve officially been doing so for roughly 5-6 years now, so not a lot of time, but not a small number of years nor experience either.  Presently, I am actively looking for a new group of people to make wonderful solutions with.  I’m excite to venture out and get outside of my comfort zone!

There is this one question that I am getting asked a lot when interviewing:

“What is your process when you do UX?”

Well isn’t that a question to grind your teeth on…

Installing Windows 8 on Windows 7 via Parallels

Posted on by ARSpaulding

After working a few days directly on a tiny touch device, I’m feeling a little cramped in Blend and am spending about as much time moving window panels around as I am styling controls.

Rather than doing a partition to my hard drive, finding another machine, or pleeing with the powers that be to give me a new monitor which has HDMI support and sitting on my hands waiting for that to come through – I’m Parallelsing it!

Navigation – it’s about what the visitor wants

Posted on by ARSpaulding

Navigation.  It is the make or break of any website.  It can be your strongest asset or your weakest link.

If people are coming to your website and they struggle to find what they are looking for, they will abandon your site.  This means that all the work, time and effort – hours, days, weeks, and months working to have a website put together goes down the drain for that individual.  Those hours have little to no ROI, except as a potential metric of “under 10 seconds” visitor.  These visitors could be your most powerful visitors, but because they couldn’t find the information which is valuable to them, they left and you missed out on the opportunity to win them over.

Creating stuff with HUMANS in mind

Posted on by ARSpaulding

I’ve been pretty quiet around these parts. Busy – REALLY busy. As in, last night I thought that going to bed somewhere just before 11 so that I can wake up and be AT THE OFFICE by 5am to be a pretty good night’s sleep compared to other nights.  THAT busy.  What the heck have I been doing?  Well – it seems that there are a lot of complex business problems which need to be solved, and a lot of it centers around figuring out how to connect with a company’s users on their level.  Now, these places have a great number of users, but as many things go, over time, the way stuff has been done isn’t really working out in the long term.  A lot of it comes down to business and customer growth.  Just to note, business and customer growth is GREAT!  But these things also introduce new challenges both internally as well as externally.  From personal experience, when I am so  very deep in knowledge, it can be tough to see clearly about how to solve some of these seriously intricate problems, and I’ll end up having to pull in someone who isn’t “infected” with the in-depth knowledge to keep the high level view in frame of mind.  I can only imagine how this could be even more so for individuals working inside of a company facing these challenges.