In this episode of the DevReady Podcast, we were joined Miriana Taflaga. She is Principle – Experience Design from Symplicit on and how to work alongside developers to make your brand more successful.
With a background in marketing, Miriana moved into the tech space with a great understanding of how branding brings value to a company. She now helps to consult on projects of all sizes, allowing her clients to make better products for their customers.
Topics Covered:
- Human-centered design: design that is always thinking about the end-user.
- Design thinking.
- Monitoring human behavior to inform UX and thinking design, and how to test your assumptions.
- The beauty of being able to reframe your “How Might We…”
- Sometimes it’s better to let the customer run through the whole process.
- How to conduct research when you don’t have much to go on.
- Focus on the guts of the product, not the appearance.
- The beauty of constraints and designing within them is that it allows for real innovation.
The primary strategy is, of course, to listen.
The early adopters of UX spent a lot of time observing people and how people are behaving, but not enough people are doing this now.
Miriana explains to observe people in a way that will inform your design by doing the following: defining a problem you want to solve, mapping out all the assumptions you could have, and finally spending time observing what people are actually doing.
It will also help to create some kind of discussion or observation guide to structure the testing of your observations.
Miriana runs down how to write and ask questions that will yield the results you’re looking for in your client interactions.
Moving on to the topic of design, Miriana talks about the kinds of products that have actually been successful and what features about them aided in their success. A major component Miriana describes is focusing on trying to solve a problem: the best tech design has this quality. And what to avoid? An onslaught of features.
The features should never outweigh the design for the problem space. Miriana describes a Venn diagram with the following parts: desirability, feasibility, and viability. UI developers should use this as a tool for understanding whether a proposed solution can come to fruition, or whether it should be funded at all.
She also describes the problem of saturation in qualitative research, which should signal that you need to speak to some more people in your target market.
In conclusion, Andrew and Miriana discuss the concepts of low-fidelity, mid-fidelity, and high-fidelity, and why each stage is important to test along the design process. It deals in discovering what is actually viable and what is not, and keeps the lens focused on the problem, the product, and the end-user.
If you understand what your customers want and value their voice above all, your design will no doubt be successful.
