 “No matter how beautiful your interface is, there should be less of it”.
I’m currently managing the design team at Stanford Health Care. My role consists of planning, creative direction as well as hands on interaction, experience and visual design. One of the best things about working at Stanford Health Care is that we have the privilege of working with an active and engaging patient population that provides feedback at every stage of our design process.
Prior to SHC, I was with Lumo Bodytech in Palo Alto working on an incredible wearable technology, tasked with providing UX | UI and Visual Design support. Before that I was Design Lead at MedHelp International where I was contributed to the experience of several successful mobile applications for iOS and Android as well as mobile web experiences with data visualization, and white label solutions for companies like G.E. , Walgreens, and more.
About my process…
DISCOVERY
All projects need to begin with proper perspective and full understanding of the audience and problems being solved for them. Listen to your audience! Questions early and often tend to flush out solutions as well as give space to consider new inventions. In this stage I’m trying to gain an empathetic understanding of the problem I’m trying to solve through observing and engaging with people to understand their experiences and motivations. This also includes research and general information gathering that is relevant versus solely relying on my own assumptions.
INTERPRETATION
Defining requirements and components are essential to designing a feature that meets the outcomes you seek. Take time to meet with your audience to help define a framework that helps solve their problems. Question if there are affordances that exist that you can leverage or do new patterns need to be created and tested.  This is the time to think through various use cases and interactions through heuristics. Sketching is great for getting lots of rough ideas out first to share vision with the team and include them early in your thinking and solutions.
EXPERIMENTATION / TEST
Investigating new ways of delighting an audience and challenge the purpose of what is good design today always with the question, can it be improved? Get concrete feedback with prototypes before implementing solutions. User testing at this stage helps get early feedback and allows for quick iterations.
VISUAL DESIGN / IMPLEMENT
Once the earlier steps are well defined, you can move on to the visual aspects of your design and work out solutions through typography, graphics, grids and color. Style guides, grids and pattern libraries are useful, but don’t be constrained by them. Empathize with your audience, constantly design on their behalf and not yours. Meet with your development teams early and often to identify challenges with your designs. If you have a great design team you can feed off each other’s creative drive to push innovative ideas forward resulting in amazing work.
I believe my designs are a balance between art as well as science. I want to solve problems for people and delight them. When an audience is so immersed in a well made product experience, it can become a part of their lifestyle and help them accomplish a goal, and even make life easier for them.
Never stop learning and draw inspiration from everything. Never be afraid to fail.
TEAM EXPERIENCE
AGILE / LEAN UX / CASCADE ~ WATERFALL
SKILLS
USER RESEARCH
USABILITY TESTING
PERSONA’S
SITE MAPS
PROTOTYPING
USER FLOWS
INTERACTION DESIGN
UI DESIGN
BRANDING
ILLUSTRATION
TOOLS
INVISION
ILLUSTRATOR
PHOTOSHOP
INDESIGN
MAC / WINDOWS
PIXATE
PROTO.IO
RAPID SKETCHING
Thanks!
Isaac Villanueva
isaacv@nuevaarte.com