Melissa Denby
Design Approach
The best designs are created by understanding our users, and collaborating with a team across disciplines to a produce a thoughtful, intuitive experience. This happens through learning, creating strategy, aligning a team, iterating, and gathering feedback.
Collaborate
Every voice is important.
I like working with people from different disciplines to create designs. By creating an environment that allows our team to listen to each other, think together and whiteboard multiple ideas, helps build trust and align the team.
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I also coordinate with visual design, content design, user research, and across multiple product teams to ensure design consistency throughout the product.
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I've led workshops that include team members from Project management, Development, and Design to walk through strategy, requirements, priorities, and future thoughts.
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Iterate
Always creating and building.
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I’m always working to create the next design or break down a design to iteratively deliver it. Working in an agile environment, and balancing team requirements, means every part of a design may not be able to immediately be implemented. I sometimes need to iteratively deliver a design so the user gets a full experience while planning for future design improvements.
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On the other hand, I enjoy thinking ahead because it allows time to collaborate, align the team, review competitors, gather feedback, and user test designs. There have been many times a whiteboarding session or wireframe has been referenced for six months based on creating a future iteration.
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Feedback
Learning from each other.
Feedback is an important part of the process. Of course, through user testing and learning from our customers to create a better product, but also through relying on the feedback across our teams.
This feedback is gathered by presenting to the design critiques, Design User Experience reviews (DUX), within my teams, and to the entire product team. It helps me create better designs with my team, and align with design leadership goals, and well as connect with others whose designs may overlap with mine.
However, feedback is not a one-way street. I participate in giving feedback to other designers, within our teams during retros, and support them as they create designs. I’ve mentored new hire teams, interns, designers, and facilitated workshops for other teams.
