and Learn Your Craft for Real

Slides of my Iterati talk yesterday.

I believe in always finding ways to do something you love.
After working as a professional Interaction Designer for many years (freelance and in large agencies in New York and Montréal) the transition to starting and running my own business provided me with lots of valuable insights into things that previously annoyed me about clients.

Designing a product, designing a brand, an e-commerce experience, packaging, designing customer support, shipping the products, shooting campaigns are all the new hats I am wearing and some for the first time.

Each new perspective gained by being part of each stage of the big cycle of production made me a better designer on parallel projects and helped me understand better both the client, and the business goals.

As an experienced designer I thought it was a simple design challenge to create my online store; turns out that when it’s your own baby you care more and in a different ways, leading me to learn some fundamental things about my craft.

• real-life can be counter intuitive: breaking pre-conceived interaction design rules is good
• risk is humbling: critics and feedback make your product better
• who cares about your ego?
• the user experience designer is not designing the user’s experience