I believe a product designer is a person who can deftly navigate through the rigors of experience design and visual design. A product designer should be able to take a project from concept through delivery, employing various methodologies in research, design, and testing.
With a better understanding of my product through insights and research, I am able to design experiences that better satisfy both user needs and business needs.
Through an iterative design process, I can deliver products designed to more closely reflect research findings, analytics insights, and user expectations.
There is no better way to validate (or invalidate) a solution to a design problem than by testing. When in doubt, test, and test again.
All of my work at CDW revolves around solving a user need or easing a pain point (and our users come in all shapes and sizes). Additionally, our users may have disabilities that make it difficult for them to interact with our website, so my designs need to be 508 compliant.
In 2017, a small team embarked on a journey to better understand how software is sold. It was through that research journey that we learned how our customer's experience with software both online and offline were being negatively impacted.
When making extensive changes to a product, we must carefully consider the new user flow. In redesigning the Product Finders experience, I documented the original flow and incorporated new paths to the redesigned flow.
Compare Original and New Flows (PDF)
I approach wireframes as a blueprint of all the elements and interactions that should be present within a design. I prefer to design low-fi wires that are not too prescriptive of UI and thus do not restrict the creative process.
High fidelity prototypes allow us to test our design solutions in a controlled environment. With prototypes, we are able to simulate our product and potential design candidates with micro interactions as they would play-out in a real-life situation (on your desktop/laptop, tablet, or smartphone).
I set out to consolidate several tools into one global utility for both desktop and mobile experiences. This utility would provide users with a consistent experience throughout so that they may access the CDW Help Center, initiate a chat with a product expert, and provide feedback.
View Prototype (Axure RP)
CDW’s B2B DNA makes it a desktop first experience. Unfortunately, the mobile experience suffered from having a very small subset of features and thus had negligible traffic. It was a great opportunity to bring new life into this neglected product. My work in this redesign project touched many site areas, improving the UX and UI of the mobile experience. Our redesign saw instant gains in viewership and usage and, in turn, instant gains in revenue.
Migrating this microsite to a new code base gave us the opportunity to overhaul the experience. We designed a full-fledged product compare experience, distilled it to an MVP and divided the work into release phases. I created multiple documents to guide my team through planing three release stages and possible future work.
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© 2013 – 2019 Angel Cortes.
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