Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
     - D.H. Lawrence

In designing mostly interactive systems (spaces, processes, and artifacts for people to use), I must increasingly stretch the limits of communication tools to explore and document what it will be like to interact with the things I create. Artifacts used in communicating design create an inherent frame of experience between the subjective response of the person for whom I design, and my expectations of their response. There is a divergence of meaning in that the audience can only experience the communications artifact, not the object being communicated.

As much as we want all projects to have exhaustive requirements gathering, user research, and UX design phases, the reality is that UX professionals are often asked to accomplish a lot with very little time or resources. This means we frequently have to get creative about how we can focus and speed up our work to deliver strong results within the constraints we’re given.

I’d like to share an example of a recent project I had to design an online dashboard that would manage land and investment properties across the world. By maintaining focus on a strong, close working relationship with my client, we were able to get rapid results that the client and I were both happy with.

As is the case with most projects, resources were tight and time was limited. From prior focus groups, the project was handed to me with some meeting notes, various images and logos, and wireframes. But the overall process, client expectations, and user needs were still very unclear.

As a follow-up to this post about how Chris Neale uses stop motion techniques to animate paper prototypes, Chris has just announced the release of The Anitomizer, a free stop-motion animation tool.

Check it out…