The mind+machine™ Method

Currently, I am serving as a UX Engineer for the data analytics consulting firm, Evalueserve. "Engineer" is used here in the sense of a technical specialist, not akin to a software engineer.

(Due to the strictly confidential nature of the firm's work, a very limited amount of information is shared below. See the ISO 27001 standard.)

Our clients and stakeholders are business leaders and domain experts who tend to have little to no exposure to UX and product design, and are in need of urgent guidance in such areas.

With the support of our in-house UX & UI team of a dozen business analysts, UX designers, and UI developers — I'm here to partner with our stakeholders and clients to create the best experience tailored to their users.

BACKGROUND The Universal Pain Point

Having worked with many different clients in business domains such as finance, development, market analytics — a common occurrence is that they all come with a solution already in mind.

Yet, when I start asking about their users, they always respond saying...

You know, that's a really good question.

It tells me that they are skipping too far ahead without understanding their users' problems well enough. This is where I come into the picture.

Playing the combined role of a UX specialist & a consultant, I educate them about the value of delivering a good experience and how that can be achieved through our process. I then work closely with all parties to oversee the product from ideation and design through implementation.

Good business data alone isn't enough — a clear understanding of the product users is necessary to arrive at good insights

RESEARCH A Right Approach for the Consulting Practice

Unlike product organizations, consulting firms operate on a flexible pace due to their contractual cycles with different clients — everyone comes to us with a similar need, but with a variety of demographics and challenges.

When it comes to UX work, it means that our team has to favor methods that are more fitting for this particular environment in order to stay nimble and lead the UX effort more efficiently and adaptively for our stakeholders, clients... and most importantly, their users.

Rather than starting from a blank slate every time, I work regularly with our domain experts to understand the problems from their point of view.
Most custom products we build are for solving a different set of problems in similar ways, so I conduct competitive analysis of existing products on the market whenever appropriate.
As our clients' business domains are longstanding industries, there is a wealth of literature available to reinforce my understanding. I often refer to academic and industry research throughout each project.
Similarly, whenever I'm unable to gain access to end users for research, there is general industry knowledge available that can at least support the creation of proto-personas.