Stephenie Bell - Studio Talk

Stephenie Bell is a graphic designer who works at global social media marketing agency - Social Chain. Despite studying fine art at university, her work is now primarily focused on web/app design and UI/UX. It was interesting to gain some insight into this area of design to help with the current design for screen brief. Bell talked about the term ‘Digitally Native’ which means when you’ve grown up with technology and you’re intuitive in its use. She also gave some interesting facts such as: -

• we spend 2.5 hours a day on average on our phones. 
• Mobile first - always start on a mobile UX design then scale up to desktop.
• Big companies do laborious tests with different ux and ui’s to work out the human psychology behind them and what designs work best, for example, apple have guidelines for the ideal pixel ratio of buttons.

When talking about her design process, bell summarised it into these steps:-

-Brief comes in

-Ideas and decisions

-Low fi wireframes

-Feedback

-High fi wireframes

-Feedback

-Refinement

-Prototype

-Build

When asked the question ‘What makes a good app ux?’ Bell responded by saying that it tends to be the most clean and minimal ones and referenced ‘Lean UX’s’ - uX stripped down to its bare essentials. This was interesting to hear being in the stages of creating wireframes for the mobile app and the idea of creating interesting bespoke design which its still clean and minimal will be something to consider doing that.