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Design Role Description

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Emileigh Barnes edited this page Jul 6, 2016 · 5 revisions

Role Summary

A designer is part strategist, detective, problem solver, and quality assurance manager. They are responsible for crafting the experience of a product or service; learning about the problem, uncovering user needs, setting a direction and creating prototypes for a solution, and validating that solution through testing, feedback, and refinements.

Design should both inform the product strategy and be informed by it, and designers should be active contributors in crafting this strategy. Designers are critical in translating the big picture vision to it’s execution through the experience, and in contributing user data back to the strategy.

Capabilities

The following sub-disciplines of experience design span the skill sets a designer might possess, or specialize in:

Interaction design: information architecture, maps and models, interaction patterns, and flows

Front end design: rapid prototypes and accessible HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Visual design: branding and identity, visual systems and libraries, infographics, and illustration

Content design: editorial planning, writing, editing, storytelling, and governance strategy

Research design: user studies, interviews, personas, usability testing, analytics research and discovery workshops

Key Objectives

  • Objective 1: Understand

  • Conduct research to understand your users’ needs

  • Identify opportunities for improvement

  • Help establish a long-term product vision

  • Learn from analytics and quantitative data sources

  • Objective 2: Explore

  • Scope features and priorities

  • Articulate a vision for the product experience

  • Map out potential solutions and barriers to success

  • Create working prototypes

  • Validate design with real users

  • Objective 4: Collaborate

  • Lead workshops and facilitate design discussions with stakeholders and users

  • Effectively manage subject matter expert knowledge, stakeholder feedback, and organizational requirements while staying true to user needs

  • Define, implement and maintain design and editorial standards

  • Focus on ways to build trust with the public

  • Present information clearly and concisely

  • Objective 5: Build

  • Craft functional, beautiful prototypes

  • Plan and launch pilot programs

  • Solicit feedback and iterate quickly

  • Reuse code and design assets whenever possible

  • Engage and contribute to the open source community

A Sprint in the Life of a Designer

Discovery: We learn about the problem, identify user needs, and brainstorm possible solutions.

Exploration & prototyping: We define experience and design principles, set a direction, and create prototypes.

Validation & feedback: We validate our initial hypotheses through testing, gather feedback, and continually refine our work.

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