I am a researcher, analyst, product designer and design manager with 25 years of experience in digital product design of mainly (Business) process supporting tools. With roots in information ergonomics and human computer interaction I believe that a good understanding of the context of use helps in designing the right thing and designing it right.
If you are interested in my work history, please look at my LinkedIn profile or download my resume.
Successful (digital) products all have in common that they are carefully designed and crafted in search for the sweet spot of the optimal value of use, given the technical resources at hand and in line with the way the publisher likes to operate in the market.
I help companies to find these sweet spots.
As a product manager/design lead I follow a design thinking approach of at least two cycles where I first explore the problem space and afterwards the solution space before starting an agile (detailed) design and development process. I am used to working with (agile) teams of developers and designers. Emphasis of my own contribution during this process is on four topics:
Without a clear and (more important) shared vision of why the product should exist, a (re-) design will, most likely, not be successful. Of course this vision can and must be revised after you learn more about the context of use of a product. But a good starting point can reduce the searching time for the sweet spot between feasibility, executability and value. Over the years I have applied a number of techniques in workshops to collect information from users, (potential) buyers and business stakeholders to understand their drives. I often use: Product visions, Strategic grids & Business Model Canvases.
Both a product vision and a design concept ask for a thorough insight in the buyers market and the context of use. Over the years I applied market enquiries, traffic and service data analyses, interviews and usability tests to gain insights from (potential) buyers and users. The insights can be captured with customer journeys, persona’s or user story maps to share them with stakeholders.
Successful products are designed with a clear and simple idea (the concept) in mind. This concept is communicated in marketing and (user) support material, but also by the product itself through the User Interface. Target group users easily pick up this core idea, which helps them learn what to expect from the product and how to benefit from it. Finding this concept is crucial to the success and always a team effort. It helps teams to focus om what is important. I use several methods to come up with such a shared concept. Examples are: design sprint, 1-10-100 and 5-3-1.
During development and even after release, I focus on making a clear product roadmap with logical releases. As a product owner I formulate user stories, prioritize them by expected value on the product backlog and introduce them in sprint planning sessions.
Design of larger products is not always finished when development starts. In this way it is possible to include findings from the development and insights of research done on product parts that are already released. Integration of ongoing architecture, design and research activities into agile sprints is often a puzzle, since design and technical architecture most of the time do have a different velocity then the development teams.
When working with multiple teams, or on a family of products, setting up a design system with reusable well documented design and code elements can be useful. I coordinated implementing such a design systems in several organisations.
One of the largest independent Managed Service Providers in the Netherlands wanted their self service portal for professionals and secondment agencies to become more user friendly.
As lead designer I coordinated a research and design team resourced by Keen Design that was capable of pinpointing and solving the weakness in the old solution as perceived by both users and stakeholders. Since design, development and user testing were done in parallel, I worked closely together with the product owner.
Cyclomedia is specialized in large-scale and realistic visualizations of the (public) environment. Their viewer of 360 street level images needed to be rebuild and the UI needed to be updated so it could host more types of images and new functionality. Keen design redesigned both the web and mobile application.
As a design lead and UX architect I was responsible for the overall concept and I coordinated all iterations of the design of the new web and mobile app and add-on’s like 3D measuring and crowd sourced images.
iCOV is a collaboration organisation of multiple governmental law and order organisations who work together on intelligence which can be used for detecting white collar criminality and money laundry practises.
Two of their standard reports and the process of acquiring them were reviewed from a User eXperience perspective. As UX research lead I coordinated the research activities that were conducted by a team of Keen and I formulated the final advises to iCOV.
Sprakles is a company who is successfully operating in the online print business. They have a small team of very capable UX/UI designers, who had a hard time to keep up with the high demands of multiple agile development teams and still be able to bring in ideas from a user value perspective as addition to the ideas generated from a more technical and business oriented perspective.
As an external design coach I helped them to introduce supporting UX techniques to do this within the fast agile product cycle of Sparkles.
Higher education ICT-cooperation SURF was in search for some practical use cases to apply IoT in a campus setting. In first stadium we conducted research among students, teachers, researchers and campus facility managers and came up with a number of customer Journeys related to campus use. One of them was selected: Ad hoc finding of free space for special purposes.
In a Lean UX process a MVP was built and test at a Pilot location. As lead designer and interim product manager I coordinated all.
NedGraphics, specialist in the processing of geo-data of above and below-ground infrastructure, has a rich portfolio of applications. Although functionally very appreciated by their customers, the user experience was often 'unpolished'.
In a number of projects various designers of Keen Design were involved to improve this. As client lead I was responsible for aligning all designs and making the process efficient. I initiated and coordinated the creation and introduction of a design system to support this.
If you want to know more about my work, please feel free to contact me.
René Scheffer