I’ve created this Medium post to work alongside my creative portfolio to serve as a hub to showcase my UX experience and my process. I started life as a designer and occasionally still freelance as a product designer so I find it a strange request when a client or a recruiter asks to see some “wireframe examples” because I like to showcase the final product as per my portfolio.

Wireframes

A wireframe for me is a document that gets beaten up, ripped up, chucked in the bin and then improved on iteratively to get me to the next stage of testing and prototyping.

Phew! So there you go, a small selection of the wireframes, user journeys and ideas that I’ve kept or taken photos of. But all of those are nothing without a little bit of context around them and the actual research that took place before that…

Problems

After around 9 years working in the industry at agencies as well as client-side it’s fair to say I’ve taken on a number of briefs and tackled a lot of problems. Here’s some of the common ones I’m often tasked with -

• Fixing navigational problems
• Sign up / on-boarding
• Landing pages
• New features, how and where to place them with the existing architecture of the app / site.
• Or my favourite, complete overhauls and redesigns

Research

Depending on the brief or the problem that’s been given to me, the first thing to do is research the problem and gather all the data I possibly can. Audits, competitive analysis, surveys, questionnaires, interviews, personas, flows…

Which leads me to, what I think is the best part, creating concepts and idea generation.

Prototypes

Prototypes tend to come after wireframing but it’s not uncommon for me to skip static wireframes altogether in favour of interactive wireframes. Pixate is my tool of choice at the minute but getting to grips with Framer and Origami.

I then look to testing these and validating my proposal with user testing, A/B testing, usability testing…

Testing

This was taken from one of many remote research / testing sessions with UserTesting.com

User research is something I’m learning to love a lot more as the data and insights you gather can be totally invaluable.

I’ve led and taken part in focus groups, test sessions and beat-ups and creative reviews.

Next Steps

I love getting my hands dirty and getting stuck in with a project, so the next steps for me would be the refinement, the interaction design part which includes creating beautiful visuals, UI, working on animations, transitions and gestures.

Tools

Tools of the trade that I have experience with and commonly make use of:

• Adobe Creative Suite
• Sketch
• Marvel / Invision
• Pixate / Framer / Origami
• Axure / Omnigraffle / etc.
• HTML / Javascript

Summary

I read a lot of books, articles and blogs on design and UX which helps keep me up to date with the latest trends, methods and technologies as well as serve as inspiration. I take online courses occasionally to brush up on my skills or learn new ones in the field of UX. I think it’s vital in this field to have that hunger to keep wanting to learn.

What, I like to think, gives me the edge over a lot of other designers / ux’ers is that I actually have my own product on the market with Snapd App — so I know how the process works from the ground up and can view briefs from an empathic perspective. From concepts and ideas, into building a team, creating prototypes, pitching to investors, raising money, planning dev sprints, managing the team, user research, prioritising goals, managing users/community…etc!

You can view my experience here: https://www.uxjobsboard.com/resume/neil-metson/

And some of my work here:

http://www.nmid.co.uk/Portfolio/

I share a lot of articles, thoughts and ideas about UX, Product, start-ups and business on Twitter so please follow me @nrmetson. Or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Thanks,

Neil