S01 : Ep. 12 : UI/UX Design – The fast growth industry based on human-centric design with Warren Prasek – Connect Develop


UI/UX Design – The fast growth industry based on human-centric design with Warren Prasek – Connect Develop
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In this episode Warren and I dive head first into uncovering the details of one of the fastest growing, rapidly evolving and new-age design industries – UI/UX Design. What is UI/UX Design? What does it involve? Why is the design thinking approach so heavily embedded into its practice? What does the profession involve? What skills and software capabilities do you need as well as understanding its applications with the latest technological trends such as AR and AI. Speaking to Warren, I learned a lot myself about (in my opinion) one of the most valuable design professions now, and in the coming future.

As Product Design Lead for Fortitude Valley based tech start-up Connect Develop, Warren creates simple, engaging and highly functional digital product experiences using human-centric design principles.

The relatively new and rapidly evolving field of digital product design features an array of cryptic acronyms and overlapping roles... for example UXD, UXR, IXD, UCD and UI... yes you can google them, I'll wait 🙂  Ultimately they all revolve around the challenge of understanding and empathising with the challenges faced by real people -- their backgrounds, goals, contexts, experiences and expectations -- in order to create effective solutions for them.

A key daily focus is using lean methodologies to quickly deliver incremental user and business value in an agile, cross-functional team environment alongside other designers, devs, BA's, QA's, Product Managers and support staff. This typically involves defining research-based use cases for a number of personas then creating user journey maps, process and screen flows, interaction states and patterns, sketching conceptual wireframes and proceeding toward rapid high-fidelity prototypes... testing iteratively all the way with actual users. 
Warren's career in digital design spans 20 years across SaaS B2B and B2C tech startups, corporates, agencies, freelance and consulting in both AU and the UK - folio at www.wprasek.com. A sideline in professional travel, event and commercial photography has yielded a few international awards and publications - check out www.xoodu.com.