Which/What/How many projects should I have in my portfolio?

Well, here’s the list of 5 projects that will help you sail.

Guarantees a healthy UX Discussion.

A heuristic analysis of an existing product.
Refer: This example

2.

A visual design concept of an existing product.
Refer: This Example

3.

Your own idea which translates from problem finding to final Prototype.
Refer: This Example

4.

Redesign an existing product by articulating its existing user experience.
Refer: This Example

5.

An article explaining your UX journey so far.
Refer: This Example

Work courtesy
Neelanjana Dutta Sarah Croughwell George Vasyagin

No doubt how awesome is our design community :)

Ready? Set? GO!!

Questions? Please ask!
Suggestions? Please share!
Btw, you can also find me dribbling here.

It took us 100 hours to study the product to its depth & even today 
we can find hidden features :) That's not because of what you are thinking.
Itsbecause Wooqer has infinite possibilities.Yes, am not kidding here! 
TBH, its like bunch of lego blocks which can be formed to different 
objects based on users need & demands.

Let me be clear, Wooqer manages in & out of retail operations. The users include from the sales guys at shop floor to the CEO sitting at HQ. Everyone has their own needs & Wooqer fulfills that equally for them.

Still confused? Let’s have a look at their personas & get to know what it takes to run retail stores! (Btw, the characters are fictitious assets)

After having a clearer idea about what the users what to achieve & how Wooqer fits in their lives, we went back to the drawing board & started evaluating the existing product on basic heuristics standards, usability guidelines & job story.

Heuristics not only helped me to discover the UX gaps but it also opened up a door of possibilities which I kept writing in my pocket diary as I went through.
One of the example from the heuristics is shown below where if the user clicks on the dropdown present at extreme right, the content changes on the extreme left without any contextual feedback.

When we tested against users, they were equally confused after clicking the menu!

It was clear that there’s a lot of design scope in this product & we have to make it happen faster!

But how? Its a vast product! It might take us 3 yrs if we go about changing everything! The business can’t wait for so long! There was no scope for MVP because the whole product was already infront of us across Web, Android & iOS platforms!

Those were the days of hard-thinking. Where each one of us were scratching our heads towards a direction. Lots of sleepless nights & black caffeine got us somewhere. We coined the term “Baseline product experience”.

Every product should have a standard quality of its experience below which it is qualified as unusable product.

Of course one can leverage that into larger scale but this is the least a product should have.

We defined the baseline experience in three different segments
~ Interaction Design
~ Visual Design
~ Content Strategy

Cheers to the man rahul ajmera for guiding us towards this thinking!

Now we had a target! The next steps were to set ourselves a deadline & work backwards to achieve it.

Myself & Prashanth Lakshman are the two UXers in the team & we owned the product areas equally. I started the dashboard with my favourite tool Balsamiq like this:

Lead by Rahul Ajmera, we kicked off the wireframes after drawing a quick I.A of the existing product. That was a golden period where we enjoyed every bit of stress we faced while making design decisions.
Meanwhile, Zau stepped in with her Visual Design skillsets to layout the foundation of Visual Design standards in the product.

The collaboration started between Prashanth, myself, Sahas, Zau & Niranjan (called as CTO of design team :P) where we iterated with HTML & CSS along with strategizing uniform content across the product, creating prototypes & Visuals mockups.

Zeplin came as a saviour for us while handing over the assets for final development. Can’t thank enough to Sanjay, Rohit, Abhinav, Pranav & all other whom I might have missed here for developing the experience we all desired!

Currently, we are still building the product over our baseline experience. The experience graph will always be high. You can walk through the whole product here.

Remain curious & keep learning. There’s lot to be achieved out there.

Curious to know more? Drop me a line at reachin.ankit@gmail.com :)

The very next week, I got the product HULK -The deal platform, apparently was the backbone of nearbuy (by Groupon) business. The product team described hulk as “Changes in Hulk is the only constant thing in the product” — describes the dynamic nature of the product.

Respecting the fact, I took an oath that day.

Get to know Hulk - A product which facilitates the complete life cycle of a Deal. Those days Salesforce was responsible for the complete deal cycle & it used to take 20 mins just to create a deal.
On the top of it, a consumer has to wait for 5 long days to experience it. Phew!

It took months to digest Salesforce as a product & the challenge was to craft a better experience of the Deal cycle.
It hit hard, I felt off those days. How can I ever imagine to be better than SF?
Self belief — helped me gather my confidence and I looked up for a competition.

The stage was set, build a better tool than Sf.

I was with my tools, set to reach the peak of the mountain, taking one step at a time.
While the Product manager was busy conceptualising business requirements(very very dynamic) and user stories, I had my page stories ready with a firm I.A in back of my mind .

I realised how important is to show relevant information in the right time v/s showing all information. I created the architecture before jumping into sketches. I.A polished my interaction flows & navigations & I was so amazed that I could visualize the whole product in my head!

I was ready & motivated to take up the upcoming challenges. Its very important to recognise the personality of each element of your product, thats when you will marry them with the other elements and create a meaningful Information Architecture. A White board was my pal those days, I spent days and nights in & around the board to make sense of the mess.

The things you own end up owning you- Tyler Durden

I was good to go on my drawing board & the golden phase of sketching began with bundle of sheets & Balsamiq. I felt I was going good, with all the elements being used properly. The design satisfied the functionality, things started appearing meaningful!

But I was making mistakes. Blunders like forgetting to place a SUBMIT button at the end of the form were few of them.

While experiencing your own design, when you can’t find the final CTA, you suck! That was the time I actually realised the importance of so called “User Centric Design”
I grew up then by including an extra angle in my thoughts- A UserAngle. Sales team was my primary user and I never bothered to talk to them except gathering business requirements. I was busy in my own world of thoughts, drafting sketches & imagining that a user will exactly think like me while filling the form. I started sitting with users instead of sketching solutions, ate with them, experienced their lives, their challenges & understood how filling a 20 min form adds more to it.
I realised how design can make impact beyond screens. How painful it becomes when you can’t find a field in a form amongst the chaos of Social, economical & tonnes of other pressures.

Thats it, I said “You gotta win their hearts or you don’t deserve to be a UXer”

Meanwhile, the design team at nearbuy (by Groupon) was growing , headed by nashatwork & with a sound technical guidance by Surendra Vikram Singh ,we were 5. Both of them had immense experience to drive the journey into the right direction. Its always a great pleasure to put your thoughts in front of your team, since they get baked and come out nicely then. Backed by my users, I used to present my designs to the constantly growing team. Got tonnes of critiques, went to & from from drawing board to users and vetted each and every design decision.

Sketches were bringing smiles in people’s face!
By design, we managed to reduce the deal creation time from 20 mins to 55 secs.

Believe it or not, its the best feeling in world watching people smile while knowing that you are also a small part of it.
We finally cracked the time of deal going live from 5 days to >24 hrs. The happiness was back in the floor as the guys were able to create a deal sitting at Starbucks Coffee, closing businesses & most importantly building trust with their users.

And thus, we bid adieu to Salesforce with a massive respect for creating Lightning Design System & touching many lives.

Lightning Design System 2

We also built our own framework, popularly known as Phantom that helped us maintaining consistency across the products while making better design decisions.

Phantom - Nearbuy's responsive CSS framework

We started building products with a systematic design process in house, ran design sprints in Trello, pacing ahead of the engineering Sprint. Brought engineers into daily design critique showcase & conducting various Usability testing for internal as well as consumer products.

And before I miss a moment, let me introduce you guys to my team- the nearbuy design team.

P.S: My first post here, kindly bear with me :)