Coryndon Luxmoore is an independent interaction designer, one of the best in the region according to Mass HighTech.
He recently completed projects with The Law Lab at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and Thomson Reuters. Clients in the past range from L.L. Bean, where he led the design of its call center application user interface, to work with CVS/pharmacy, Legg Mason, Sapient and Fidelity Investments. His clients come to him in order to make their Web-based and mobile applications more user friendly and functional. In other words, more useful.
The 1994 graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design took the time out to answer five questions about his work and how he got to this point.
PBN: How did you get started in User Interface/User Experience work?
LUXMOORE: I came to Rhode Island to study product design at the Rhode Island School of Design. While I was at RISD I became increasingly interested in using computers for design work. A short internship designing CD-ROMs for the educational market turned me on to the idea that the technology industry even existed and that it had important design-driven components. I began professionally designing for the Web in 1996, working on an early subscription-based learning community for Ziff Davis magazines.
Beyond Cash Donations: How New Forms of Giving Are Transforming Not-for-Profit Accounting
Evolving Funding Landscape for Not-for-Profits Not-for-profit organizations are being asked to do more with less,…
Learn More
PBN: When designing UI/UX, what is your starting point – the capabilities of the software/hardware or the problem that the consumer is going to be using the new product to solve?
LUXMOORE: The right balance between the business, technology and the user is critical to all projects. Having one of these elements out of balance will create a product that is undesirable, undeliverable or unprofitable. My primary job is to represent and advocate for the user in the conversations with the business and technology stakeholders.
These passionate debates generally start with a client coming to me with a specific business idea or technology application. How work begins depends on the type of product and its maturity and the scale of the project. When starting from scratch with a new product it may be appropriate to do some research to understand the current behavior of the target user. For existing products it may be simply testing current customers to understand where a product is not working. Once the parameters are understood, a process of rapid screen prototyping and testing solutions begins.
PBN: How often does your design work cause the client to go back to the drawing board to respond to issues that you have identified?
LUXMOORE: Since most businesses have deep industry expertise and typically can identify an opportunity in the market successfully, it is rare for projects to be entirely scrapped because of issues uncovered during the design process.
Changes in the product are typically focused around the execution and delivery. These changes are a refining of the original concept but can be fundamentally different from how the business had originally conceived of the solution. One of the biggest challenges I face on projects is building team consensus to make major changes to a product because minor changes will not deliver the desired results.
PBN: Are you ever brought in at the beginning of the process, i.e., before the software or hardware has been designed, to come up with the basic concept for the solution? How often do you wish you had been brought in early?
LUXMOORE: Much of my work these days is focused around helping startups define and refine how they deliver their products to customers. Working with startups makes it easy to be involved early, as the entire business organization is new and learning. Helping these young companies create successful products is especially important in Rhode Island as the state and efforts like Betaspring work to grow new businesses and industries.
Larger corporations are beginning to realize that bringing design in early to the process is better for the end product and can save the company quite a bit of money by allowing for user input prior to building the solution. Adding user and design input later in the process limits changes to tinkering around the edges due to the sunk costs in hardware, software and business processes.
PBN: What is more important for the user experience – great UI/UX design or great software/hardware? If you could only have one, which would it be?
LUXMOORE: A functional solution to a real user problem trumps both great UX design and great software/hardware.
Great user experience is not just provided by the design team but also the engineers who make it work. Part of my job is to make the invisible visible and show the user the beauty of the code through the interface design.
