About Me

I love talking to people, learning about them and the problems they're trying to solve.

My career path has been an exciting journey from animating feature films to designing enterprise solutions.

My Approach

  • I focus on understanding the 'why' through qualitative and quantitative research.

  • I target outcomes over outputs.

  • I learn about the jobs-to-be-done and their desired outcomes so we can deliver value.

  • I believe in continuous discovery.

  • I deliver work iteratively and measure its impact.

  • I communicate what I learn with all teams to encourage a user-centric work environment.

User journey map
User journey map

Research

Collect data to draw valuable insights from our users and their behaviours. Methods can include interviews, usability tests, activity monitoring, event data analysis, and interactive exercises such as card sorting or book jacket designs to name a few.

Desired Outcomes

  • Increase awareness of user behaviours, patterns, and mental models

  • Increase understanding of target personas and their problems-to-solveIncrease level of empathy towards end users

  • Increase awareness of the vocabulary used by end users

  • Minimise risk of designing and building the wrong things

Opportunity Solution Tree
Opportunity Solution Tree

Synthesis

Gather the data captured from the fieldwork and break it all down into smaller pieces in order for it to make sense.

Desired Outcomes

  • Increase awareness of themes, patterns, and points of interest from the research

  • Minimise risk of jumping to conclusions in terms of solutions

  • Increase level of fidelity in the production of user journeys, personas, information architecture, empathy maps, and opportunity mapping

Empathy Map
Empathy Map

Ideation

Where insights become solutions.

Desired Outcomes

  • Increase confidence of proposed solutions by developing prototypes and running usability tests for review

  • Minimise risk of devoting development time and resources on solutions that don’t effectively address the opportunities

  • Increase team involvement to gather a broad spectrum of solutions

Design Jam file
Design Jam file

Development

The prioritization and production of the solutions.

Desired Outcomes

  • Increase confidence in delivering the right outcomes by breaking down proposed solutions into small deliverable chunks

  • Minimize effort to measure impact and value over time and determine whether more work is needed

  • Minimize risk of committing to long development cycles on unknowns

Pol Desmarais

poldesmarais@gmail.com