In the coming months on our blog, I’ll be interviewing some of the members of our team at Evolving Web to give you some insight into how they work, their perspective and their field of expertise.
Interview with Annika Oeser, User Experience Designer
The first interview is with our UX Designer Annika Oeser. Annika specializes in user interface and experience design. She also helps organizations translate their branding to a digital context by creating wireframes, style guides and reusable design patterns. Here’s my interview with her:
Q: How did you get into design?
A: I’ve always liked to create things. I was drawing a lot as a kid, moved on to photography and then studied graphic design.
Q: How do you define UX design?
A: User Experience Design is the process of creating a useful and delightful experience for a human being, mostly in a digital environment, but not exclusively.
Q: What is your design process?
A: My ideal process is to start to research the problem, then move on to solution finding with time for plenty of iterations and user testing in between. Of course, in real-life, the process sometimes looks different.
Q: What is the importance of UX for websites?
A: A good website experience is everything we all want for our users, isn’t it? Ideally, you accomplish it with great functionality AND beautiful visuals together.
Q: How do you know that what you’re designing works for the user? Tell us a bit about your approach to research in your work.
A: Although you can adapt your design to proven standards, you never really know what works for your users unless you ask them. There are multiple approaches for research: you can observe and interview potential users to find out what kinds of needs they have in the first place. If you already have a prototype of a solution, you can do user testing in person or remotely. If you already have a working website, you could also do A/B tests to iterate on small adjustments.
Q: When a project manager says, “Hey, I don’t like this design”, what do you do?
A: I’ll ask her why. Constructive design critique is essential to any design work.
Q: How do you keep on top of current design trends?
A: I read and browse a lot on Twitter, Medium and blogs. And luckily I live in a city with an active design community, so I go to meet-ups quite often.
Q: What is your role at Evolving Web?
A: At Evolving Web, I help developers address design-related issues that arise during implementation and I worked on projects for Western Digital, SoftwareONE, Bibnik.com and Drawn and Quarterly.
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