Joseph Cohen - UX, IA and Design professional

About Joseph Cohen

I'm a User Experience professional that has created jolly good online experiences for the last 9 years. My work has reached millions of users and has generated millions of pounds in revenue.

I have an impressive record of delivering industry leading solutions, and while these are big, vague words, most of my work is measurable ensuring clients can monitor the performance (and I can boast about the results)... I'm happy to supply the figures on request.

I take projects from conception to deployment, working and guiding stakeholders at the every stage of the project lifecycle.

Requirements Gathering

Helping companies discover their true vision is comparable to taking a bus full of 7 year olds to Hamleys toy store and asking them to agree on one shared toy. Every stakeholder has a unique understanding of the needs and objectives, and while each perspective can be valid - they are rarely the same as his colleagues.

After running numerous stakeholder and user interviews, thoroughly analysing the competition, going over existing website data and researching the target population I am able unify the stakeholders and provide a blue print to the website in a language that the business can understand and the developers can build from.

I work with the BDD language Gherkin to produce these requirements as User Stories and Scenarios.

Information Architecture / Interaction Design

If content is king on the internet, then information architecture is the kingdom; there is no point to a king with no kingdom. The internet is no different, it doesn't matter how regal your content is if it cannot be found or used then it is pointless.

To ensure content is correctly structured I engage stakeholders and users in a series of workshops, run card sorting exercises, issue surveys and study the analytics to unlock current behavioural trends. Once I have established the existing / potential structure and behavioural patterns I document these findings in task and user flows, functional structures, site categorisation and architectural diagrams.

User Experience Design

How a user interacts with a website is a combination of universal behavioural patterns they use on the net, and behavioural patterns unique to your website. Any proposed website must consider these two principles when designing the experience.

Existing patterns must be captured to ensure that any improvements don't contradict expected user behaviour. After the potential site behaviour has been forecast I unify it with the objectives to produce clickable wireframes that I test on end-users for suitability.

Once the wireframes have been proven I move on to producing the designs which I turn into a working prototype and again refine and quantify through video recorded end-user tests that monitor the on screen interactions.

Front-End Development

I code my pages using the latest in web standards best practice to clean and structured accessible websites, complying with the relevant guidelines (DDA, Section 508, WCAG). I markup sites in HTML(5), CSS(3) and JavaScript (coded or library), while all of my pages are structured to realise their true SEO potential.