Artists create to relate and inspire. The most renowned works are those that establish the strongest emotional bond between the artist and their audience. The same is true for designers, however, they create with a message or idea in mind. Designers attempt to communicate something that already exists, for a purpose.
It’s Senior Interaction Designer Sandra Li-Rosi’s job to do just that. She works with a range of Intuit products that help small businesses handle their accounting, payroll and taxes and identifies as the primary UX designer. Her small team also works on tools related to worker’s compensation and HR compliance.
“I love turning complex tasks into simple ones — it’s like solving a puzzle,” Li-Rosi said. “And I love knowing that the designs we create make our products better and, in turn, improve the lives of small business owners.”
Design runs in Li-Rosi’s blood. Her grandfather was a shoe designer and her father, a photographer, kept a darkroom in the house. Helping her dad photograph shoes for catalogs inspired her to study architecture and general design and after taking a graphic design internship she earned a position at an agency. After seven years, and many roles, she landed a job at Intuit.
Starting her designs with a whiteboard or sketchbook, Li-Rosi brings her best drawings into OmniGraffle and puts together wireframes to move into Fireworks or Photoshop. From there, she grabs components to put together into a high-fidelity mockup and uses InVision to create prototypes for testing.
“For all the designers out there, stay curious and keep asking questions,” Li-Rosi said. “Curiosity is what keeps us digging deeper and deeper into customer insights and it’s also what helps us explore more ideas.”
With so many innovation methodologies out there, where does a designer begin? To help you get started Li-Rosi listed her top five design and innovation resources as well as her favorite innovation tools.
Design/Innovation Resources:
Pinterest: I use this site to look up all kinds of design inspiration — from UX and architecture to photography and graphic design. It’s a visually stimulating way to get ideas.
Dribbble: This site is great for visual inspiration (eye candy).
Gibbon: A great site for bite-sized UX lessons and inspiration. It’s a great way to learn and share knowledge.
Medium: This site has really good UX/tech articles.
UX Booth: This is a great site for UX articles.
Top Innovation Methodologies:
Adaptive Path: I love the approach Adaptive Path has for mapping customer journeys. It’s really important to approach design by looking at the experience flow because it really helps us get into the mindset of our customers and see how they approach and solve problems. The customer experience begins outside of our products and journey maps help us have a better understanding of this.
Sketchstorms: I love sketching. I find that having a “sketchstorm” — when appropriate for the phase of your project — can be more productive and inspiring than regular brainstorm sessions. When you sketch you have to think of the big idea but it usually has more detail than just writing a thought down on a Post-it.
Follow Me Homes: Also known as customer safaris, this is a great way to learn about your customers and build empathy for their challenges, which you can then use as inspiration for your designs.
Prototyping: This is great for proving or disproving your hypothesis early on and learning fast.
Design for Delight (D4D): I love looking through the Innovation Catalyst toolkit and thinking of new tools or new ways of approaching problems.
The post Design: Art With a Purpose appeared first on Intuit Labs.