Collaboration is at the core of my design process. I design with the people who use things and the people who have a stake in the things being used.
I collaborate with designers, engineers, sales & marketing folks, and senior leadership up to and including C-suite executives. I make prototypes and watch people use them so that I can learn more about what they do and figure out how to help them do it better.
I design to generate, synthesize, and communicate insights and ideas.
Generating insights involves designing something and then talking to someone about it. They’ll tell you what makes sense and what doesn’t and will share lots of details about their values, ideas, and practices that may not have come up otherwise. For instance, I sketched a version of the Mendeley mobile app that allows users to take pictures of paper documents or computer screens as a way of adding new entries to their library (Figure 1).
The second screen includes a new ‘Take Photo’ option. After taking a photo of a paper document (or computer screen), Mendeley would process the text in image and automatically populate the appropriate metadata. I used the prototype to seed conversations with academic researchers attending conferences about mobile devise use as it pertains to knowledge management. Check out a video of the prototype in action here.
Synthesizing insights involves creating new designs to reflect/address customer needs identified through primary or secondary research. For example, I created an Android-based app for dumpster divers, as a way of synthesizing insights from a thematic analysis of dumpstermap.org. Dive (Figure 2) is a mobile application allowing proponents of alternative economies to search for, and add information about, dumpster contents (e.g. food, clothes, or other goods) on an interactive map. Check out the clickable prototype.
Communicating insights involves leveraging designs in conversations or presentations to support the stories I tell about people. During my time as Penn State, folks in my lab were engaged in an ongoing participatory design project with local water quality stakeholders, including members of the public and local government. We hosted a handful of hackathons and workshops throughout 2017-2018 during which we designed, iterated on, and used a prototype data platform (Figure 3) to communicate findings about local water quality monitoring practices and to anticipate/probe possible design directions.
Design Tools
I have advanced degrees in Miro and Figma. I recently graduated from paper sketching to a reMarkable Paper Pro. I’ve used these tools (and more) at The Juice Learning, Renaissance Learning, and Amazon Web Services in my work as a UXDR. I have also taught both tools at the college level.
jordan beck, phd 