Process

Five areas of focus

UX process is easy to talk about in theory and hard to apply in practice. Every project arrives with its own constraints like budget, timelines, team maturity, technical debt, and risk tolerance. These constraints make rigid, one-size-fits-all methodologies brittle fast.

My approach treats process as an adaptive system, not a checklist. I use Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience as a foundational architecture that scales up or down depending on what a project actually needs, while keeping user needs, business goals, and execution aligned.

Related material

Inspiring words of wisdom and guiding principles Design Thinking (IDEO Labs) Design approaches for mitigating risk to user adoption

Stage 1: User needs & business objectives

Stage 2: Functional specs and content requirements

Stage 3: Information Architecture and IxD

Stage 4: Navigation and user interface design

Stage 5: Visual design

— consider the following product concept —

Vehicle Passport

The Vehicle Passport project is a deliberately blue-sky, first-generation product concept designed to make that thinking visible. It’s not a case study polished by hindsight, but a working exploration of how I move from ambiguity to structure—researching, defining, modeling, designing, and validating a product from zero to one.

Smarter smart cars.

Stage 1: User needs & business objectives

Stage 2: Functional specs and content requirements

Stage 3: Information Architecture and IxD

Stage 4: Navigation and user interface design

Stage 5: Visual design

< Abstract Ideas

Concrete Deliverables >

View the original diagram.

Guiding Principles

I subscribe to the following definitions and beliefs.

“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product or service. It’s not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

Marty Neumeier – The Brand Gap

“Experience Design is the design of anything, independent of medium and across media where human engagement is an explicit goal and human experience an explicit outcome.”

Jesse James Garrett

“If you don’t have time to do it right… when are you going to have time to do it over?”

John Wooden

“Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of a lone genius.”

David Kelly – Founder, IDEO Labs

Design Thinking

The core ideas behind design thinking — such as empathy, iteration, and human-centered problem solving — trace back to design disciplines in the 1960s–1980s, particularly in architecture, industrial design, and engineering. IDEO, led by people like David Kelley, was pivotal in applying design thinking to business and technology in the 1990s and early 2000s. They helped package design thinking as a repeatable process that could be used by non-designers:

Empathize → Define → Ideate → Prototype → Test

Design Approaches for Mitigating Risk to User Adoption

Time and money don’t grow on trees—and validating business and design decisions with real users can be resource-intensive. But not every project carries the same adoption risk. When Amazon introduced the Alexa Show, it was introducing a new interaction voice-first computing paradigm requiring extensive user research to ensure acceptance. Contrast that with a bank launching a feature that allows car loan payments from third-party institutions; a useful update, but one that builds on familiar behavior. The five models below outline different 5 different design approaches that are defined by the level of validation effort (time and money) they employ to mitigate the perceived risk to user adoption.

Design approach models

Self Design

Design decisions are made primarily from the designer’s own perspective. Fast and intuitive, but highly susceptible to bias and blind spots.

Unintentional Design

No deliberate consideration of user needs—decisions are driven by technical constraints or business pressure. Risk is unmanaged rather than mitigated.

Genius Design

Design decisions rely on existing research, prior experience, or established patterns without new validation. Effective when the problem space is well understood; risky when assumptions are outdated.

Activity Design

Validation focuses on tasks and usability through structured, activity-based research. Appropriate for refining known behaviors and reducing friction.

Experience Design

Deep, contextual, and often longitudinal research aimed at understanding lived experience. Best suited for novel products, new paradigms, or high-stakes adoption risk.

What AI can do well

AI can accelerate work within every approach—generating hypotheses, synthesizing data, or exploring scenarios—but it cannot determine how much validation is required.

Adoption risk
Regulatory exposure
Brand implications
Human behavior in real contexts

What AI cannot do (yet):

Accurately judge the emotional, cultural, or contextual nuances of user behavior
Replace real-world exposure to novel paradigms (e.g., Alexa’s voice interface)
Understand unspoken needs or hesitations that come through in qualitative research
Decide how much validation is necessary based on risk, regulation, or brand implications