Creating interaction-relationships.

Although it is not my main focus today, my expertise about user experience and design build a foundation for everything I do today in product development, research and defining strategies for the customer experience. You need to know what works, how it works and understand the relationship between users and the objects they are interacting with, to be able to develop sustainable and flexible concepts and strategies to address the needs of customers.

It is my belief that a user centric design approach and an adaptive, flexible information architecture are pillars of great interaction design. Every design should be funded on the principles of a great user experience. The ideal experience integrates in life’s situations, not just with the task itself, but in context with everything that surrounds the task. It improves a process; it makes you forget that very process and it lets you interact intuitively with the application.

Illustrator, OmniGraffle Pro, Axure Pro and Keynote

In the past years I have created various concepts for user experience and information architecture. It was a shift from creating sets of design elements (like in traditional identity design), towards a more interactive, process flow based design, that came along with the evolution of Web applications. I have been using software like Illustrator, OmniGraffle, Axure Pro and Keynote, to create wireframes that were partially clickable, to demonstrate the actual user interaction.

Applying some of the User Centered Design principles, I integrated learnings from testings with user groups, from tests with clients, and sometimes this was leading to results that would radically change the whole application design. Results from Web Analytics as well as Conversion Goals were also used to improve the design.

Corporate Websites, Dog Communities, Product Launches, School Community Web Apps

I created UX and IA concepts and worked on wireframes for small Advertising and Web agencies, for Namics, for TBWA\ Switzerland, for consumer goods, business to business services, for product launches, as well as institutions and publishers. Some of these wireframes were directly transformed into visual design, some others became clickable prototypes for tests and Web development. These applications were made for the Web, or mobile devices like iPhone, Android phones or iPad.

Responsibility for the Best Possible Experience

As the director of the digital unit, it was part of my job to transmit my knowledge to the creative teams, helping Interaction Designers to find and implement ideas, apply learnings and experience. Taking a close look at information architecture and learning principles of user experience changed my view on design as a whole, my ideas about what good design and application development means today. The whole interaction chain – what I would call the flow – consisting of user expectations and behavior patterns, are resulting in interaction design and application development. It should follow a modular, object oriented approach, enable us to create better experiences and come up with solutions which are more satisfying, because they are simpler, more elegant and better to use.