Visualwild, an online presentation of selected projects by James Ricks, User Experience Designer/Architect.

"There is no limit to what a man can accomplish when he doesn't care who gets the credit."

-Attributed to Abraham Lincoln, quoted by Franklin D. Roosevelt

Process

Quick & Dirty

Many timelines do not warrant research. In these cases, the process is often as follows:

Verify business & development needs / constraints
Extend existing personas to include new scenarios
Create workflow diagrams to document deliverables
Create medium-fidelity wire frames and test with 2-5 coworkers
Refine wire frames and build HTML prototypes
Test prototypes with 2-5 coworkers
Flesh out designs and final coding

Enterprise projects are the result of countless meetings, hours of research, development, and "learning moments."

Tools

Depending on the company culture, my toolset can include:

User / Process Documents(Personas, Group Profiles)

Adobe^™ InDesign & Illustrator
Microsoft^™ Visio & Word

Design(Mockups, Visual Design)

Adobe^™ Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Kuler
Corel^™ Paint

UI Development(HTML, SharePoint^™ UI, Interactive Media)

Adobe^™ Dreamweaver (no WYSWYG)
Adobe^™ Flash Pro
Microsoft^™ SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio
Open source: jQuery, FlashDevelop

Workflow

UX creation is a process of parallel and tangential efforts. This time-table reflects only a small portion of the efforts of each group, especially those of development and business. It is also important to note that depending on the time alotted to the project and usability resources available, many of these stages can be collapsed.

Hover over each effort to learn more:

Research

Deliverable

IA/UX Process
ROLES
Business	IA	UXD	Dev
Concept
Identify problem, need, poss. solution, benefits		Brand / trends input	Tech. input
Author creative brief (IA-authored, Business / UXD / Dev. ratified)
Discovery
Competitor functionality review*		Competitor design review	Competitor tech review*
	Obtain market data / conduct surveys Find user segments ** Field Interviews Identify needs, goals & pain points. Define personas Perform task analyses Create work flow process diagrams	Create competitor mood boards Create project mood boards	Create competitor tech specs
Team review of deliverables
Development
	Develop Information Architecture Develop nav model		Create dev test specs
	Create initial wire frames
Team review of wire frames & refine
	User test wire frames & refine Create prototypes User test prototypes & refine	Early creative mock ups Creative mock up review & refine Informal / Formal user acceptance testing & refine	Validate tech specs for prototypes
Finalize prototypes
		Apply creative to prototypes User test creative & refine Finalize creative via user testing	Begin function coding - UI not firm
Team validation of final prototypes after testing
Final Dev, Refining & Testing
		Extend prototype to final UI and make back-end connections
Multiple rounds of final testing - validate that prototype experience has been fully translated.
* Employ matrix / cluster analysis ** Employ cluster & factor analysis

Awards & Recognition