by Janus Boye
A recent photo from Emily’s home office
A few years ago, it finally dawned on me, that our focus as a community had shifted. From the original roots in bringing together web and intranet professionals, to a much broader scope. Suddenly, it became clear, that the work we were doing, the lessons we learned, had a much bigger impact.
I was reminded of this, when I spoke to Seattle-based Emily Corace and listened to her talk about her work on user-centered design. As she said:
“To create something that is naturally understood we need to focus on the behavior of the user. By designing experiences that are understood intuitively, we can create a positive impact through our work.”
This is clearly about much more than just creating a pretty website!
Emily is an Experience Designer with The Garrigan Lyman Group and our expert of the month.
Creating change through design
To create an experience that truly resonates with target users, the investment must be made to first understand them. Research is a big part of Emily’s work as an Experience Designer. By identifying obstacles, opportunities, influencers, and touchpoints, she can design an omnichannel strategy to provide the experience users are looking for.
With her background in advertising, she’s worked behind the scenes as the voice of many brands as they strive to improve the world around us.
To quote Emily:
“Creating change through design is the focus more than ever right now. Consumers demand extreme corporate transparency and brand authenticity, forcing the question to become ‘how do we use our brand platform to help change the world for the better?’ What an intense pressure! But now that we as consumers know we can demand it, we will accept nothing less. And we expect to feel this brand essence in every website, ad, email, app, and banner driving toward a better world.
This escalation of brand responsibility necessitates a more rigorous experience design and Content strategy practice when designing the pretty digital platforms that tell those critical brand stories.”
Looking at her day-to-day-work, Emily describes it as all about exploring a problem at the beginning of the project and then shepherding a solution through discovery, design, development and finally to deployment. Depending on the project state, she may be creating technical documentation, conducting stakeholder interviews, or designing accessible interfaces for digital products. Not every step of the UX process can be world changing, but each detail and documentation effort contributes to people enjoying our world a bit more.
As a source of empathetic inspiration, she mentioned Maya Lin, who designed the unconventional and influential Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. When Maya Lin won the design competition, she was a 21-year-old Yale architecture student. While the design was controversial as the first U.S. monument not to feature a soldier, its mirrored surface reflects the face of a gazing visitor, connecting to their humanity before their patriotism.
Creativity leads to new experiences
During our conversation, a rare plane crossed through the skies not far above the garden where Emily was sitting. As we were on the 3rd month of COVID, planes were few and far between, and Emily made the point that working from home involves a different level of human trust & confidence.
“Consider the amount of imagination, creativity, and focus we have to have when sitting in our own houses of distraction. And still, new tools, features, products, are launching from living rooms everywhere.”
She shared examples of how creative people can be with the technology we’ve had for some time. Being in quarantine has made us innovators, using software like Zoom or similar screen shares to do new things. Many have used FaceTime with a relative for the first time or perhaps used a blanket as a yoga mat.
As an example of new experiences, built in a non-complicated way using existing technologies, she brought up 36 Cinema - a first-of-its-kind experience that brings you live streamed movies with live commentary from directors, actors and superfans.
“I was able to sit in Seattle on a Google hangout with a friend on the east coast while listening to a commentator in New York discuss live movie commentary with the RZA in LA, as we all watched the same screening of a kung fu movie. That’s creativity, and nothing about that is breaking news in the tech space. Its people being creative and resourceful in a way that’s not too far beyond the adoption of today’s users.”
Learn more about Emily Corace
On her personal website - emilycorace.com - you can read a case study with a recent project with Ziply Fiber.