Claudia Cepin - Design activities

UX Design activities play a pivotal role in shaping effective and user-centric solutions and are conducted during the discovery and exploration phases of a project.

By engaging stakeholders and users in collaborative sessions, such as co-design workshops and design feedback sessions, valuable insights are gathered to inform the iterative design process. Design jams foster creativity and rapid ideation, while design reviews ensure alignment with design systems, project goals and user needs. Interactive designs bring concepts to life, enabling stakeholders to visualise and provide feedback on proposed solutions. Usability testing validates design decisions by evaluating the usability and effectiveness of prototypes with real users.

Together, these activities serve as essential tools for iterating on design solutions and ensuring that the final product meets user expectations and business objectives.

Workshop facilitation

Facilitating workshops offers a versatile approach to collaboration, whether engaging project team members, convening subject matter experts, or gathering insights from research participants. With various workshop formats available, selecting the most suitable one depends on the specific problem at hand. The key lies in tailoring the workshop to the project's requirements to ensure the outcomes are relevant.

Workshop with ATSI group

Journey map created during a workshop

Miro workshop slides with activities

Context workshop outcomes

Workshop with emergency services

Roadmap workshop

Planning out a workshop

Persona workshop with SMEs

Workshop activity in Miro

Context workshop

Co-design workshops

Co-design sessions are great for collecting a lot of different ideas, perspectives and view points. Not every idea can be transformed into a real design but understanding how the thinking influenced the design might translate into another idea that could also work quite well. The more ideas the better the end-result. It's good to go out wide with the thinking to capture all considerations.

Outputs after a co-design workshop

Co-design workshop with the digital team

Co-design with emergency services for floods

outputs

More co-design outputs

Co-design workshop on a Miro board

Design feedback session

This workshop was a design review session with SMEs, project stakeholders and team

This design review session was conducted online using Miro

Interactive designs

My design process is greatly influenced by the design research and workshop activities that came first. Everything needs to be considered, so when I go back to the drawing board I know that the design is build on solid foundations. With that in mind a design still has to work within the constraints of a design system, system architecture, business requirements, customer needs and discovery research.

Sometimes there is not a lot of information available and in that circumstance the design itself become the object of the research to find out where it needs to be improved.

Either way it starts with sketches on paper or a whiteboard, followed by creating wireframes in a the design program. Axure can help deliver simple wireframes that can then be expanded to clickable and dynamic prototypes. Sketch designs can be converted into low-fi or high-fi prototypes but it has limitations for animations, hover states or dynamic content. InVision is handy for prototypes that are clicking through a specific journey. Adobe XD allows a bit of everything. It depends on the features that need to be tested that will decide the best software to use.

Design reviews

I think of design reviews as comparing something existing like a Bespoke software package, custom interface or website and assess it in terms of usability, interaction and branding and give recommendations on how to either bring it closer to the brand or design system.

Below are a few examples of design reviews