Design Process

I found our story finding and visual design process fun and surprisingly similar to processes that I have used before for design brainstorming – I guess theres a reason such sticky note techniques are widely used by designers 🙂

Last semester I took a class called Engineering Innovation and Design. As a brainstorming exercise for our final project, we were told to get into groups, grab a bunch of sticky notes, and then write down the first things that came to our mind. We proceeded to put these on the blackboard, cluster them, name our clusters, and work off each others ideas just like we did in our class.

Similarly, over IAP I had the opportunity to brainstorm and prototype a new feature for the company I was working at. In our very first meeting, the head of UI/UX at the company explained the problem, what we were hoping to accomplish with this new feature, and then proceeded to hand me a whiteboard pen. The three of us in the room spent the next hour repeating the process of ‘draw for 5 minutes, talk for 10min,’ and by the time we left the room we had sketches that encompassed about 90% of what the final feature ended up being.

Thinking back now, this process of rapid brainstorming with sticky notes and whiteboard pens is something that I’ve done whenever encountered with a new UI/UX problem. When it comes down to it, I think that data visualization is highly correlated with UI/UX, because you’re taking something that’s otherwise unreadable and trying to make it attainable and emotion eliciting from your readers.

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