mock-up & Prototypes - Home Page

My collection of mockups and various design concepts that I have created over the years can be accessed from the right sidebar. Some areas are incomplete but they all have descriptions of the work I completed. Some ideas went into production and some stayed on the shelf.

Some Applications like FMCSuite and EVault's Desktop and Archive Agent are in the field being used by their clients.

Each area has a detailed description of the requirements, some may have workflow diagrams, and some may even have the original prototypes used for the approval and actual development of the application.

Unfortunately not every project got the same attention due to time, resources or budget constraints. What you see here is real world results, what we as User Interface Designers / Usability and Interaction designers and Information Architects will deliver to clients for review, signoff, and what guides developers through the development process and keeps everyone on the same page.

The Reoccurring Nightmare

You see, we can't live without business requirements and the harsh truth is that most companies don't have a solid development process in place, let alone a good UI design process to help us do our job in a more organized way. Companies are not taking the appropriate action to invest in requirements before they start developing. And what I mean by requirements is NOT a two pager explaining why an existing client needs a feature upgrade. Requirements to me are a details business doc that covers some market research, that points out other potential opportunities besides a current client's need for a one off upgrade that will not pay off, (No ROI here).

Poor Communication

Developers are not reusing components, they just don't communicate across silos and departments. I have seen first hand, multiple reporting systems on a suite of products, multiple types of interface elements performing the same functionality and hitting the same databases, but because they were built by different developers working on different modules with different mandates, things were created in isolation with no standards in place. This is a large part of why developing software is so expensive.

The four little Rs "redundancy, rework, rewrite, redesign. By the time I come in to the project, they are already suffering; their client services and support staff is overwhelmed with work. Companies have to hire more support staff to accommodate their growing client base. The overhead continues to build, profits continue to diminish.

Companies are in Trouble

The story is usually the same, a company will hire me to help in various areas, first, they want to reduce support calls by improving the overall usability of the application in question (the usual story goes like this) "We have an application, it's hard to use, clients are just not getting it, and it's costing us a lot of money to support this application. What our development team built just doesn't address our clients needs. We need help!

In most of the companies I have worked for, I was responsible for creating and setting the UI design process, and define the way UI designers would interact with PMO office, PMG, Development, and QA.

Interesting how things work out, you come into a company to design an interface, or help them re-architect and reorganize their user interaction and overall usability and sometimes you end up helping define a better development process that ties into the existing culture nicely.

What I bring to the Table

So what I bring to the table is a simple approach, with simple methods. Allot of communication, documentation, wire frames, and static prototypes published on your corporate intranet and exposed to clients if need be for proper review. If companies start investing up front, in propper documentation and UI prototyping, developing applications will be the least of their worries.

R.G.