I'm a digital product systems strategist, designer, and people leader with 23+ years of experience in many industries, currently exploring new opportunities.

It's simple, really.  I love to problem solve creatively with, and for, people in digital spaces.  It's the people that make this work so fulfilling and rewarding.  I fully subscribe to the 3 'Co's';  Co-operation, Co-llaboration, and Co-celebration.

My journey has taken me across many disciplines within design, across many teams, and I'm incredibly grateful for it all.  I've worked in some of the most wicked of complexity spaces with massive distributed teams and resources down to micro-startups, including that team called 'just me'.

It is an amazing time to be in this field, doing this work.  I can say without hesitation that I love what I do and there's always a problem to be worked somewhere, a client to help out.  As we saturate more and more of our lives with digital experiences, it's critical that we work to build engaging, useful, and appealing digital products and services.

Please contact me at chrisbraun1@msn.com for employment and project-specific considerations. 

- Chris

My management style

Collaborative - I work closely with team members across, up, and down the chain for alignment. I believe that when people feel personally and professionally fulfilled, encouraged, and inspired, they’re more likely to achieve exceptional outcomes, together. For me, it is all about people, processes, and products, in that order.

What I value

1. Open and clear communication
2. Participatory, data-driven, & user-centered design
3. Knowledge and information sharing
4. Consensus leadership - Within and across the organizational structure and project teams
5. Continuous improvement & learning
6. Innovation - But not at the cost of effectiveness and a successful experience
7. Teamwork
8. Empathy
9. Collaboration
10. Cooperation
11. Co-celebration

My design process

1. Gather requirements - Project baseline for what the user/business goals are
2. Perform user research - Gather existing research or perform generative studies
3. Create use cases - Primary and alternate flows to handle each function
4. Generate task flows - Understanding how each use case will flow
5. Build wireframes - Roughing out the visuals for each flow
6. Build mockups - More fidelity as consensus and clarity builds
7. Build prototypes - To aid in closer understanding and conveying the UX
8. Test/verify/validate - Usability testing if need be
9. Gather and manage feedback - Happening all the time and is crucial
10. Iterate
11. Handoff - Exact spec assets to dev or stakeholders

While no one process can be a fit for all projects, teams, companies, and situations the idea here is tailor-ability while still addressing the key milestones (requirements, design, test). If you’re not addressing those, well .. hopefully, you're moving in that direction!

 

Current production tools

• Whiteboards
• Figma
• Sketch
• InVision
• Craft plugins
• Proto.io
• Zeplin

I have used so many tools in the past that the list here would be massive! If there's a tool I haven't used and you or the company requires it, odds are I will be able to pick it up extremely fast.

Deliverables I create

• Sketches
• Wireframes
• Low to hi-fidelity mockups
• Final design comprehensives
• Prototypes - Rapid concept and clickable versions
• Personas
• Journey maps
• Process flows
• Documentation - Reports, studies, requirements, style guides, interface specifications, user stories, process-related, etc.