User-based design for a successful digital project

Alexandra Barcelona

Jan 22, 2014

What's the difference between designing a project and designing a project lead by user experience? Chris Do of Blind discusses what it was like for his team to make the transition from designing with the project first verses figuring out the user and designing for them individually at Oshyn and The Skool's Tech Mornings: Ubiquitous Design.

Video Transcript:

Jose Caballer, The Skool: “So recently Chris, you worked on a project for a large storage company and you got a chance to use the user experience process as a foundation for the whole brand, you got a chance to use The Skool OS. The reason for this is that during our practice session, Diego mentioned, and it what we’re talking about, that now design has become more important and that user experience has become more important as Skot was saying. What was your experience designing from a strategic point-of-view based on users, based on brand attributes, based on business goals, something that is sometimes left to the agency or the client to give to you when you’re designing a motion graphics piece, here we had to get it out of the client so we were acting as consultants, give me your…how it occurred for you, your experience as a designer as a principal as an agency, how was that process for you?”

Chris Do, Blind: “Going through that process myself, defining who the users are and having a better understanding of the users, it really drives the design decisions. So when I sit down with the designers that are working on the project, we’re not making subjective or arbitrary decisions, they’re educated guesses, but they’re based on the client’s understanding of their own users and their customers. So that informs us about the typography, the colors that we’re using because it needs to speak to a very specific audience. So for example, if the demographic is female, aged 35, that’s a very different looking site than it would be for young tech guys playing Xbox or something like that, it’s very different. So to me, it was very insightful to go through that process and design from the user’s point-of-view. Most of what we do in motion design is we get a script and we start designing frames that look cool and communicate the idea, but we’re not talking about who the end user is, so that’s a very different approach for us.”