Everything starts with people!
In this phase, my goal is to discover and inform teams, product managers, or stakeholders about user needs, behaviors, meaningful stories, and rituals.

My research skills are:

• leading and managing user recruitment and logistic (including screener surveys)

• writing and reviewing scripts

• conducting in-depth narrative interviews (in a laboratory or remote), contextual inquiry, and shadowing

• observing and taking notes

• analyzing passive data (e.g. HotJar, Analytics, heatmaps, emails to Customer Care, …)

• making qualitative and quantitative surveys

• analyzing recording, notes, transcriptions, and other data to tag relevant evidence

• creating insight and communicating results

Tools: audio recorder and block note, laboratory, Validately, Atlas.ti or Nvivo, Zoom (Skype or similar), LimeSurvey (Google Survey or similar), MS Excel, Miro/Mural, HotJar, Analytics, post-it.

I led different workshops for internal teams or stakeholders. I’m responsible for setting goals/expectations with stakeholders, planning the activities, and managing the logistics. Every workshop is not always the same! As a facilitator, I always pay attention to participants' attitudes and answers to change the workshop plan based on what emerged. In some workshops, I was an observer for taking research notes. I always communicate the results through slide decks, reports, and meetings. making a report with the results.

I lead a workshop for:

• collecting information about an existing product/service, or a team/company

• mapping existing or new experience

• generating ideas

• co-designing solutions (with lo-fi prototypes)

• defining strategies

• prioritize goals, vote decisions, and create KPIs

• making proto-personas

• mapping team or company processes, constraints, goals, needs

• making a project or team retrospective

Methods: Design Thinking techniques, Graphic Facilitation, Co-Design, serious games, paper prototyping, mapping, dot voting, LEGO® Serious Play®.

Tools: paper, post-it, lo-fi materials, and canvas (in some case, I had created specific canvas or games for the workshop), Miro/Mural, Keynote/Powerpoint.

In this phase, I make sense of all data collected during the research or workshop. I usually aggregate data to create insights, maps, or reports to inform the stakeholders/teams, create actionable and meaningful narratives, and prepare the Ideation/Prototyping phase. In general, I combine different techniques to give different perspectives.

Here a list of deliverables or techniques I usually use:

• proto-personas (from assumptions)

• personas (from research)

• scenarios

• user stories

• user flows

• user journey mapping

• customer journey mapping

• user story mapping

• service blueprints

• roadmaps

• matrix (e.g. SWOT, Plus Delta, …)

• charts
  

Tools: post-it, paper canvas, Miro/Mural, Keynote, Excel, Figma, Illustrator.

Information Architecture (IA) it’s not only about navigation maps!
IA help to connect contents to the user needs.

My IA skills are:

• defining which content(s) can help users to reach their goal

• defining the relationship between contents across the product/service (ontology)

• creating the content structure with metadata and their hierarchy (taxonomy)

• defining the labels and categories for organizing the information (with or without card sorting)

• defining how users interact with content (choreography)

• defining how the users can move through information (navigation map)

• making tree testing and content inventory

Tools: Excel, Mural/Miro, OptimalSorting, TreeJack, Figma.

That's my favorite phase!
I love jamming with colleagues, letting the creativity flows, and putting my hands on paper.
Sometimes, I facilitate the team or the stakeholders in creativity sessions with games or co-design activities.

If I ideate alone or with others, in general, my creative session will include:

• put on the table all tools as possible like pens, paper, pencils, markers, scissors, stickers, glue, post-it, … (the rubbers are not allowed!)

• reading information from personas, mapping, or other deliverables

• 1-2 ice-break games, to set the right flow

• making some Crazy Eight and then some high-level storyboards

• dot voting the best ideas with different techniques

• prototyping with paper the most important interactions, features, or key screens

• presenting the ideas to the others and starting a discussion

• sometimes, I make an interactive paper prototype with Invision (or similar) for presenting to stakeholders

Tools: paper, pens, pencil, post-it, stickers, glue, scissors, markers, Miro/Mural, Invision

Here, I define how the user will interact across the product/service on specific pages or into a flow.

Depending on the project, I do different stages like:

• defining high-level interactions with user flows, user stories, wire flow, or interaction diagrams

• designing lo-fi wireframe (with paper or Balsamiq)

• designing hi-fi wireframe (with Figma)

• designing interactive wireframe or micro-interactions (with Invision or very rarely with Axure RP)

• presenting prototypes to the team, product managers, developers, architects, and stakeholders

Tools: paper, pencil, markers, post-it, Balsamiq, Figma, Axure RP, Invision, Keynote/Powerpoint, Zeplin, Abstract.

Usability is a core part of user-centered design and allows me to validate prototypes, measure KPIs, and continuously improve it.

My usability skills are:

• leading and managing user recruitment and -logistic (including screener surveys)

• writing and reviewing usability scripts with tasks

• analyzing passive data (e.g. HotJar, Analytics, heatmaps, emails to Customer Care, …)

• conducting usability testing (in a laboratory or remotely)

• observing and taking notes (in a laboratory or remotely)

• making heuristic evaluation, usability surveys, A/B testing

• making UX QA (Quality Assurance) after sprint, demo, or release

• communicating usability best practices

• making reports to share results and possible solutions

Tools: laboratory, block notes, Validately, Morae, HotJar, Keynote/Powerpoint, post-it, Miro/Mural.

In the past, I managed projects and led small teams of 2-3 junior designers. In all these projects, I did different activities such as planning, task management, capacity evaluation, KPIs measurement, and managing the relationship with stakeholders.

Also, I facilitated retrospectives to understand the status of a project or a team.

Often I've been a mentor to help designers in their career path, or the use of a specific UX phase/technique, or give them feedback on their projects.

Tools: Wrike, Jira, Kanban board, Trello, Miro/Mural, Basecamp, Keynote/Powerpoint, Abstract, Slack.

I always work in teams or companies that believe in Agile Methodology. Agile is a very useful way to communicate, keep all aligned, and ship your product in the real world!

For me, it’s usual to work side-by-side with scrum masters, product managers, architects, and scrum teams in all the stages of the process like sprint backlog, sprint planning, daily scrum, demo, and sprint review.

In 2020, I also got a certification for Certified Scrum Product Owner® (CSPO) by ScrumAlliance.

From a Product Thinking point of view, I work closely with product managers to define the problem, create the product vision board, create the user stories, groom the backlog, and prioritize the tasks. Also, I coordinate the developers to work together on the new functions.