Process

As the founding designer on the PNC C&IB Innovations Team, I was able to shape the way we design and deliver. In order to push out high quality products and services in short timelines, our process has got to be clear and flexible. The best way to describe it is some hybrid of an HCD practice, Design Thinking Double Diamond, Lean, and Agile; while the individual disciplines don’t fit our needs, a cocktail of those tends to be the most effective and efficient for our design team.

Value

Insight Driven

By combining user research, business goals, and stakeholder needs, our team gains the knowledge of both internal and external perspectives.

User Centric

At the core of a UX designer, is empathy. Learning about the user in multiple facets allows us to design for a multi-dimensional persona.

Integrated Design

Design principles are foundational in every step of the way, but business alignment and customer focus are crucial for product execution.

Iterative

The feedback loop for wireframes and mockups should be constantly happening, so that inevitable misses and changes are caught quickly. There is a need to understand that there is no perfection, but improvements can constantly be made.

Process Phases

Discover

The discover phase is made up of contextualization and understanding. We have a few kickoff meetings to contextualize the problem in terms of business goals and perceived customer need. By doing so, we can align with the business intent and gather preliminary information from them. The second part of the discover phase is to understand and empathize with the personas in the problem space through workshops and deep dives— essentially uncovering the unknowns and insights.

Define

The define phase is made up of ideation and iteration. Based on the insights gathered from the discover phase, we create low-fi’s and hi-fi’s all while in constant contact with the stakeholders to conduct user testing and iterate on the designs. Towards the end of the define phase, the development team is also brought onboard to familiarize them earlier with project details.

Deliver

The deliver phase is made up of sprint plans, fit and finishes with the development team, weekly demos with the stakeholders, and backlog discussions for future releases.

Tools 

Whiteboard, Pen/Paper, Invision Freehand, Journey Maps, Mental Models, Stakeholder Interviews, Workshops, Affinity Maps, Personas

Tools

Sketch, Invision, Figma, Journey Maps, User Testing, Roadmaps, Scope

Tools

Jira, Sketch, Invision, Figma, User Testing, Backlogs, Sprints