Core Competencies
I’ve seen this field take shape from the days of the all-encompassing webmaster, to the narrowing of skills in the specialist and experts in the model, view, and controller disciplines. This field lends itself to a wide array of skills and a sliding scale for each respectively. My core competencies are in the following three areas: Cognitive & User Research, User Centric Design (UX + UCD), Systems Analysis, Customer Experience Marketing (CX) and Retention Strategies
Cognitive & User Research
The basis of every good solution begins with healthy research. There’s always a balance to play between how much research one does and when to jump into the physical design process. My 16+ years of design & build have shown me that this is a dance between research and design. Understanding your users’ needs will not go unrewarded. Mapping out your customers’ mental models, developing feature prioritization lists, uncovering information architecture matrices, and understanding your users VIMM (visual, intellectual, memory, motor) skills will account for 90% of usability issues.
UX/ CX Design.
Just because a user CAN accomplish a task doesn’t mean they will. That’s why my approach to design includes PET (Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust building). In addition, I also believe in testing early and testing often throughout the design process. As a Certified Usability Analyst, my approach to User Centric Design is rapid and ranges from low-fidelity to hifi comps. Depending on how involved stakeholders would like to be, I can setup design sessions to whiteboard or draw user flows, review requirements, and perform rapid prototyping sessions. I can also provide wireframes for review remotely and collect feedback on a set of design mockups or comps.
Systems Analysis.
What would a system be without a set of monitoring standards and metrics. That’s why I focus on analytics and metrics gathering approaches to help raise red flags to catch issues before they become detrimental to both end-users and the business. Establishing a set of Critical Success Factors will help ensure that your applications and systems are running smoothly and meeting everyone’s needs.
Customer Experience Marketing.
It’s difficult to engage in customer-centric design without actually listening to customers. This is why I’ve built a core competency around capturing the multi-channel voice of the customer (Voc). I’ve been able to capture the VoC of multiple brands with thousands of feedback instances in order to generate business-centric information useful for real world decision making. Retention marketing has also played a massive role in my tenure at organizations as lead generation seems to take the spotlight, but retention tends to fall off the wayside. I believe in doing both with excellence.
