Designer and Co-Founder
Build the right things, and build the thing right.
Interaction Design ↣ User Experience Design ↣ Design Strategy
Early in my career, I worked hard as an interaction designer to build the thing right when given a thing to work on. Now, what keeps me up at night is how we decide what is the right thing to spend our limited time and resources on.
Saara Kamppari-Miller
- Former HP — understanding why and when print matters in a digital world.
- Current Intel —evolving the relationship between humans and technology.
- Co-Founder, Closet Minimal — learning how to build a company.
My role as a designer has evolved from pure bread-and-butter deliverables of wireframes and flows, to being a facilitator who guides teams through fuzzy early innovation phases towards business success using human-centered design principles.
My Primary Roles as a Design Strategist
- Workshop Facilitator —Facilitate teams through big hairy problems using various human-centered design methodology.
- Sense Maker— Research opportunity spaces and represent them through visual models to bring clarity to the team.
- Planner — Define technically feasible strategic alternatives for a product that will holistically meet the user and business needs, and outline roadmaps from a minimum viable prototype, to the next release, and ultimately toward a future vision.
- Rapid UX Prototyper — Get my hands dirty making rapid prototypes to quickly to test with people to validate needs and concepts.
I also use this cupcake analogy frequently:
If your product is a cake, what do you do when you don’t have enough resources or time? Lose the frosting? Skip the filling? No, you make a smaller cake: a cupcake.
In addition to my day job, I’m also a co-founder at Closet Minimal. This is a new role for me, and is stretching me beyond my current comfort zone. Everything that I am learning as an entrepreneur is making me a stronger designer. My primary roles as a co-founder include business strategy, customer experience design, branding, and marketing.
Portfolio Highlights
- Rapid V/AR Concept Prototyping Design Methodology
- Immersive Shopping Case Study
Rapid V/AR Concept Prototyping Design Methodology
My most popular Medium articles are published at Prototypr.io, and are about sketching virtual and augmented reality concepts and prototyping:
One workshop I’ve been facilitating recently is called Play Before Pixels — Rapid V/AR Concept Prototyping with Paper, Clay, and LEGO Bricks. For this workshop, I’ve shared how to create your own kit for rapid VR and AR concept prototyping.
Immersive Shopping Case Study
This case study on Immersive Shopping is meant to showcase the context and relevance of the project within Intel (why is Intel building a clothing shopping experience?) and the breadth and depth of responsibility I had during the course of this 2 year project. From exploring immersive shopping as one opportunity area among many as a 4–5 year out vision, to executing a pilot with Zappos and multiple other ecosystem partners using existing technology. All the while keeping the very human core of this project at heart, since it’s really not about the clothes, but it’s about how confident you feel about yourself.
Saara Kamppari-Miller
Design Strategy, User Experience Design, Interaction Design
- LinkedIn Kamppari
- Twitter Designer Geeking
- Medium Designer Geeking
