Scott D. Cooksey

SR UX Product Designer   •  About

user Insights

I am a pragmatic, observant, intuitive, curious UX Product designer — an introspective thinker, if you will — who can also code in HTML/CSS as well as work with JavaScript frameworks like Bootstrap and React.

I think of UX Product design execution in four parts: Design (45%), Emotion (15%), Research (20%), and Psychology (20%).

I advocate for the user. I try to understand a users’ needs by becoming a user — thinking like a user and acting like a user. This approach is useful in a company where users have been ignored. It allows me to enter the product space without preconceived ideas, which helps in validating users' issues or struggles. 

In my experience, users range from external customers to a cadre of internal user groups such as product marketing, internal operations, quality engineers, development engineers, usability testers, release managers, customer support, other designers, leadership, and executives.

A seasoned UX Product designer doesn't just stop with external customers. They should include those users internally as well. Concluding, everyone IS a potential user.

Design Sense

My design sense encompasses most of all below depending on what a company's brand identity will allow for. If the brand guidelines are open to interpretation, then I generally like to design with the following elements. This is evident in my portfolio section.

• Use of color as a metric
• Use of legible, clean, few fonts promoting good hierarchal design 
• Icons in place of text
• Balanced, symmetrical, grid layout
• Motion appropriately placed to delight and guide 
• User reference guide contextual to page in lieu of a massive downloadable PDF
• Helpful tooltips on hover
• Minimal clicks, no more than two for the user to get to data
• Subliminal areas of interests for better focus
• Use of repeating patterns

design process

A UX design process can change and morph depending on the UX project. However, below was my UX design process while at Sungard. I tend to adhere to the following for the most part 

1.     Meeting with Stakeholders
2.     Identifying / Defining the Problem
3.     Identifying / Interviewing Users
4.     Research Solutions / Competitors
5.     Creating Descriptive Personas
6.     Establishing the User Journey
7.     Sketching / White-boarding Solutions
8.     Developing High-level Wireframes
9.     Reviewing with Stakeholders
10.     Arranging User Focus Groups / Testing
11.     Creating High-fidelity Mockups
12.     Reviewing with Stakeholders / Users
13.     Developing the Prototype
14.     Determining the Task Flow
15.     Reviewing with Stakeholders / Users
16.     Partnering with Development
17.     Partnering with QA
18.     Partnering with UAT
19.     Partnering with Release Team
20.     Releasing to Users

Of course, some of the above steps are collapsible depending on a company's budget, organization and overall user needs.

design questions

When sketching, developing wireframes and even prototyping, I like to subconsciously answer these five UX design questions:

Although any UX project will be unique to its own specific goals, etc, typically, a UX project begins with business objective (identifying / defining the problem), moderate to heavy user research coupled with descriptive, narrative user personas paired with product marketing motivations and the company's overall user aspirations.

However, UX is subjective and can be dictated by the company's outlook and future relationship with their customers. It's good for a company to have a user experience approach to help them understand and better server their user base.

Read more about my experience on my resume. Or, move on to my portfolio.