My design beliefs
While working in tech teams, I’ve complied a list of beliefs that reflect my process & leadership:
Design empathically and inclusively
Check your bias each step of the way in your design process. Practice your empathy daily and if you can’t speak for a user, invite in a voice that can. Stay up to date on ADA standards and politically correct language.
Speak up
Question what you don’t understand and challenge what you don’t agree with. Equip your questions and views with facts, knowledge, and industry standards to be taken seriously.
Know when to use what tool
There’s no one size fits all design process. Skilled designers have a variety of tools in their toolkit and know when to use the right tool for the task at hand.
Users first
Always keep the user at the forefront of your decisions. Equip your decisions with data and user testing results to make this easy.
Language matters
Use the correct technical terms and be prepared to define them. When working with product, tech, marketing and other designers we all need to interpret the information the same way to build the application.
Beware of people using the wrong word to describe a feature or component, explain why it is incorrect and kindly correct them until the right term is used.
Write things down
Talking into thin air is easy. Interpreting a conversation into an artifact is too, so do it. Notes and UX artifacts will be referenced multiple times along the design process by multiple team members, yourself included.
You will be able to find patterns quicker, hold stakeholders accountable to their decisions, and document the process for outside team members.
Always keep learning
Look for inspiration outside of conventional places, try everything for the experience, take classes, self teach, talk to people about their app experiences & how they live with technology.
Share often
Get outside of your own head by user testing, asking others inside and outside of project, design team, and industry for feedback and their opinion. You’ll learn something new!
Question everything
If your name is on the design, understand why every decision was made.