Musings

Lisa Tweedie

Balsamiq design for the PhP website (voluntary gig)

BSc (Hons) Human Psychology : Aston Uni.
PhD Human Computer Interaction : Imperial College

Requirements gathering (Interviews)
Market reviews
Use Cases/User Journeys/Site Maps
Ideation (Balsamiq)
Wireframes (Axure, Sketch, Invision Studio, Figma, XD – whatever works)
Animation (Invision Studio)
Prototyping
- Web code based experimenting in codepen and using HTML/CSS and Javascript overrides.
- Using Axure, XD, Invision Studio.
Bug logging in Jira/whatever tool you have
Expert UX and Visual Design Reviews
User Testing (Lab/Remote – Usertesting.com)
Used to being part of an agile scrum team that adapt to change quickly.

Corporate : Nortel, Oracle, Dyson, St James Place, Tibco and Hexagon (current)
Research: Imperial College, MRC APU
Consulting: 7 years remote consulting (Silicon Valley startups and more local gigs here in the UK – clients included IBM, Balsamiq, Intuit and WordPress about 50 clients in all)

I am on Linkedin

The Musings of a UX Mentor

Technology is my passion. I have been thinking, experimenting and learning about how to make tools fit for purpose for almost 30 years. I usually work alongside developers. I see my role as UX mentor because I tend to pass on skills such as Balsamiq and user testing to my co-workers. I am a pragmatic, thoughtful designer who loves to explore problem spaces with others. Three themes seem to capture what I do at the moment:

Learning by doing
Distributed Work
Evangelizing

Learning by doing

Projects

I have worked on a myriad of projects from a Java IDE at Oracle (JDeveloper) to tiny mobile and facebook apps. Each one presents new challenges. The move to responsive design was a huge challenge for many UX designers. I feel that the tools that we need to do this well are just becoming available thought the advent of CSS3 . I love adding interactivty to complex visualisations of data it was what I did my PhD in the late nineties at Imperial. It gives me a lot of pleasure to see these techniques becoming real practical tools that people are using in complex situations.

User Testing

We can’t understand the tools we build unless we see them in action. I have been doing guerilla user testing since I started. It is incredible how often I have learnt totally unexpected things when seeing products in action. The advent of remote user testing and easy proto-typing tools means there simply is no reason why we can’t get up to date feedback as we develop our products on a sprint by sprint basis. Usertesting.com is powerful tool that I have used recently as a part of every sprint.

UX Communities

UX is rapidly changing. The best way to learn and keep up to date is by thinking deeply around lots of real problems. To do this I actively participate in open UX communities like UXStackexchange and Quora. I give talks when I can and am hoping to become a part of a UX meetup community here in Swindon.

Teaching others through doing

I am also fascinated in how we learn in the wider context. Through active “doing” workshops I have learnt that in the space of about five hours you can teach a six year old to touch type, a nine year old to write a game and a small business to get a wordpress site up.

Distributed Work

Technology has freed people to collaborate in a myriad of ways . Hundreds of projects are carried out each day this way using tools like basecamp, skype and mybalsamiq to facilitate communication. This means we can re-engineer the way we do work. Many companies are now actively choosing to work this way. I am working to encourage this trend through by researching and writing about companies that promote this. I also run my own “UX remote work” group on Linkedin.

Evangelising

I love tools that help me do a great job. I firmly believe in evangelizing the products I love. I actively promote good products in many forums across the web. I blog about them and try and teach people how to others to use them effectively.

Technology I currently evangelize are: Balsamiq, Sketch, Invision Studio, Figma, Chrome and Mozilla Developer tools, All CSS Chrome Extension, Web overrides Chrome Extension, WordPress, CSSEdit, Codepen, Dabblet, JSFiddle, Opensource generally, Brushes and UX StackExchange.