Methodology

Every project begins before it has a name. Before the brief is signed, before the first wireframe exists, there is a period of looking at who will use this, how they move through it, what they expect and what they abandon. I take this phase seriously because I have seen what happens when it is skipped: beautiful things that no one knows how to use, functional things that speak to no one. Research, for me, is not a formality that precedes the real work. It is the real work, made legible. What I look for in this phase is behavior and context –the social conditions that make a user act one way on a Tuesday morning and differently on a Friday night. Design that ignores this is designing for an abstraction. The people who interact with what I build are not user personas on a slide; they are people with competing demands on their attention, with habits that predate the product, with trust that has to be earned one interaction at a time. That weight is present in every research session I conduct and every insight I carry forward.