Portfolios are a bit like an advertising brochure. The promise is implicit, the actual delivery unknown. Here I strip the frills and present to you the different entry points I could work with you from day one.
Intelligence, Frame and Build is a mental model that I use to organise my design work. Intelligence refers to gathering insights; frame is the foundation work, the logic, the systems, the maps; build is usually the UI and the hand off. They best work in a circular mode. I am personally drawn to high ownership and this usually happens with startups.
Intelligence
There are two types of intelligence: internal and external. External is gathered by learning directly from users and competitors. Internal intelligence is the knowledge that exists inside a company, often scattered across different teams. The work there is to gather and consolidate this knowledge — which might refer to users, product, market or internal processes — in a concise form that brings all team members at the same page. Collecting internal insights is a fast and relatively cheap process, and in my opinion, a vastly underestimated one. During this intelligence operation, misalignments between the founding team and the different departments might emerge. If done right though, the end-result is more alignment and engagement. Favorite tools:
Hypotheses Validation — Mapping hypotheses about users, product, market, prioritising them and planning to validate them.
Product & Brand Discovery Workshops — Workshops for early-stage projects that aim to create clarity and alignment on the product, the target users and the brand.
Stakeholder and staff Interviews — interviewing everyone from Sales to Customer Support and to Stakeholders to, on the one hand, create a repo of internal knowledge and on the other, to discover gaps and opportunities.
Prospect and actual customer interviews — this is classic, human-centric UX.
Surgical evaluative Research — A/B testing, usability testing and product analytics.
Frame
Intelligence without structure is just noise. Frame is the systems we put in place — the logic, the systems and the processes that hold everything together. This is the phase where we decide not just what to build, but how we want to build it and how we'll know it worked. Examples of structure I've built:
Information Architecture & User Flows — hi-fi mapping of the logic, interactions, errors and edge cases
Service Design Blueprint — mapping all the physical and digital touchpoints included in a user journey
Design Systems & Design Ops — setting the foundation for efficient, scalable design that allows for speed and consistency.
Scrum & Ways of Working — setting up the rituals and collaboration structure that keep design, product, and dev aligned throughout the project.
Build
When Intelligence and Frame are solid, Build is where the system becomes a product. This phase introduces requirements that weren’t always planned for — but are non-negotiable: accessibility, GDPR compliance, handoff process, and design systems.
UI — Progressively moving towards a more complete and delightful UI.
Handoff — Collaboration with developers is an art of its own. Now with AI, the flows we have been used to, are changing.
Design QA — Reviewing the live build against figma boards.
Accessibility & GDPR — Building with WCAG standards and data privacy requirements in mind is the standard and must be accounted for already in the Frame level.