Introduction

Welcome, until a few years ago I was known as what is generally called a Heavyweight Designer, a title I achieved by simply outlasting my competitors and by the sheer range of the diverse markets and clients I was lucky enough to work with. Strangely it is no longer my design skills that are of the most Market Value, though naturally they are still much in demand, but the fact that I have worked successfully with so many different people and products for so many different needs giving me a vast knowledge of User Centered Design.

From the very first time I got paid for my work, it made sense to me to find out not just what the client wanted but also what and their users needed before putting pen to paper; do your research and you won’t have to work so hard afterwards. As I moved from paper to computer I studied and put in to practice MMI (Man Machine Interface) practices, over time and as computer technology evolved this became HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and today it is known simply as Usability and what it means is simply putting the User at the very heart of every decision concerning a system’s design. This doesn’t mean just the UI, though frankly there are an awful lot that don’t even do that, but every function, every navigation element, every interaction, everything in the system should be there for the user’s benefit.

There will always be holdouts; HR departments who want to add demographic research into every process, Sales people who want to ‘drive’ users to specific sections, Marketing teams that want to have a process simply because a competitor does . . . that’s not only old thinking it’s costly thinking. If a user can’t get satisfaction out of your web application they’ll go to a competitor and unlike desktop applications or traditional high-street commercial concerns all the user has to do on the Internet is click a mouse button and you've lost them.

So, what can I bring to a project or company? Experience, flexibility and amongst others:

Business Acumen

  • Long successful history of working with Developers, Designers and Consultants
  • Extensive cross market client and user experience, including commercial and marketing solutions for Financial, Law and Education institutions
  • Capable of working at board level and staff level
  • Ability to take a team leading role if required
  • Excellent presentational and communication skills
  • Strong research and communication skills
  • Excellent understanding of business drivers
  • Massive experience with IT systems from CMS, through Comms, Social Networking, eCommerce and Web 2.0
  • Experienced of translating user and business requirements in to functional specification documentation

Usability Acumen

  • Adept at usability and functional requirement gathering and documentation
  • Experienced of running workshops and 'in the wild' for Heuristic and Contextual data gathering
  • Adept at website analysis to identify and leverage user interaction trends
  • Experience of SEO
  • Long experience of creating personas, journeys, wireframes and graphical mock-ups for many user types
  • An excellent understanding of the principles of usability and large scale application frameworks
  • Experienced of designing UX and UI for mobile technologies
  • Multi-ability and Multiple-age Social Networking UX and UI design
  • Interest and research into human psychology with particular focus on learning skills, innate communication and interaction strategies
  • Experience of applying standards and accessibility with particular focus on SEN and disability
  • Experienced in complex web applications such as CMS, Social Networking, eCommerce and web 2.0
  • Constant updating of best practice as published by Jakob Nielson, Steve Krug and Jarod Spool

Design Acumen

  • Wide ranging innovative creative experience
  • Multimedia as well as web design
  • A long and diverse design based career covering Traditional and Digital markets
  • Constant interest and research in to Internet and Digital technology with particular focus on rich-media and emerging creative technologies such as AR, VOD and IPTV
  • Digital Video production from shoot and generation through post-production to deliverables, FLV, MP4 etc.
  • Long experience of Adobe creative products
  • Massive experience of producing product interfaces as well as web applications
  • Expert in web collateral design such as iconography, banners, branding, typography and interaction processes

I have been called 'the perfect translation device', which is a title I'm more than happy to have. You see I’ve worked with so many developers across so many disciplines and worked with so many designers over so many techniques and so many users over so many different systems and markets that I change mental gears automatically between them, making certain that nothing gets lost between users > consultant > designer > developer > client > users.

That - I think - more than any one skill is why I’ve lasted so long doing something that I just love.

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© Bob Powell