"Crispy"

My Process

My process is pretty straight forward. I have learned over the years that I can't exactly keep a numbered list to follow strictly, but instead have an outline to loosely dance around as I work through a project. My high level process is easy to remember, because it's "crispy." Not literally. It's CRSPBI.

1.

Collect

Introductions, thoughts, ideas, points, schemes, each other's information. These are all things that I like to throw back and forth before making any concrete decisions.

Research

All of the ideas and schemes from above have to be doable. I love my toolkit, but I have to keep it properly oiled and maintained, thus the research. This isn't as much of "how to do this" as it is "can this be done in this scenario?"

2.

Sift

The curation phase. Almost every planning phase has its fair share of the "bloaty" ideas. I need to make sure only the stuff that will be meaningful and useful to the project is kept, and the rest, sadly discarded. Or perhaps shelved for the future!

Place

Now that I have all of these useable ideas in order, and with a dash of content, I can lay out the information architecture (IA) and early prototypes or wireframes. The project begins to become the slightest bit tangible at this point.

3.

Build

My personal favorite, the point at which I morph into my highest power form—the developer. In many projects as a freelancer, this will also involve building out a design as well.

Introspect

Step back. Take a breath. Make sure things have gone according to plan. Quality assurance testing. Usability testing. This is post production, and can be a signal to iterate over some prior steps again. Just to make sure. Then at some point—launch.

I've employed this process in several of the projects in my Portfolio.

It works quite well.