Tech a Break Abhishek - UX Design Best Practices

Editor's Notes

• #2: (This deck is from a tech talk hosted at Tokopedia in April 2015.) Hi! In this short presentation, I share a little about my experience as a designer
• #3: I have been a graphic design intern, a graphic designer, a UI designer, a UX designer and a design manager. Its safe to say that I have seen different facets of design, from hands-on to the business-driven-decision-making end.
• #4: In this journey, one of key things that I have learnt is that the design brief makes a lot of difference to how the entire design process is going to be. I have seen various kinds of briefs and have managed to turn them into successful design exercises over the years
• #5: A simple & unambiguous brief led me to design screens for an iPhone app way back in 2008.
• #6: An completely last-minute and open-field brief allowed me to make an all Flash, no-restrictions promotional website for Levis. All interactions hand-coded by your truly.
• #7: An open brief with a lot of creative freedom made me explore a lot of directions, before settling to make a physical + virtual interaction experience, for a museum in Pune, India.
• #8: All prototyping, animation, design and testing was my responsibility
• #9: If I could share just one thing to anyone starting off with an idea or a business; that would be, “Start with Design” I don’t mean ‘start by hiring a designer’, but start with an open mind, look at the problem in all ways rather than fixating on what you can build.
• #10: Design for a dialog for an in-game quest in a social game. I wanted to increase engagement and fun-quotient here. The quest was for building an army-themed building.
• #11: I converted the artwork into usable form. And then made a few variants to do a quick A/B testing within the team.
• #12: The winning design used a dynamically placed soldier on a rope. I helped the developers build it and showed the artists new possibilities within the existing framework. Moving forward, my team members always tried to improve designs beyond what they already knew.
• #13: I extended the concept further and standardized the quest windows for weekly quests. So that the artists could focus of creating the theme, rather than building the files from scratch.
• #14: A face lift to go with technology changes over time. This is how the dashboard looked. It was Flash based and half a decade old.
• #15: I revamped it to be built on web-friendly technology, revised branding, no change of features/flow
• #16: And Responsive
• #17: Another one of my works involved developing an idea into a product from scratch. I traveled to one of our call centers, where I interacted with the agents and learned a lot about their schedule, their day and the avenues for improvement.
• #18: Images from the visit and the learnings
• #19: Over a few months time, I worked with the PMs and the developers to turn the product idea into a successful product, guided by the learning from the field. Its in Beta as of today with over half a dozen clients signed up.
• #20: This one is specifically for the designers and members of the design team. The term guitar solo in a design context, is from a post on Speckyboy (http://speckyboy.com/2015/03/21/taking-the-guitar-solo-philosophy-to-your-designs/) In a live performance, a guitar solo allows the artist to go crazy for a moment with their guitar, show-off their skills and come back to the plan. In a design project, the designer should find their own guitar solos so as to channel their creative energy, while continuing to be engaged with the larger plan.
• #21: I used avatars and gradients (outside of brand guideline) to channel by creative energy, during an otherwise cumbersome product development cycle
• #22: I secured third position in a Hackathon by building a idea prototype. It took me three days, but it gave a me a lot of satisfaction. May be some day it will be picked up by the team to be developed.
• #23: Another one close to my heart: A visual phonebook with an interesting alphabetically arranged contacts. (it’s a wireframe and not the final design)
• #24: A sound-reactive identity prototype for a restaurant which hosts live performances along with good food. Made in Processing. View demo here (only works on Macs) http://www.ghate.me/smoke.zip
• #25: Thanks!