Hi! I’m Montse
I’m a creative systems thinker who uses design to map and solve complex human problems.

I find Affinity Diagrams a great way of making different types of data bites collected during research to mix and blend on the wall, unveiling new relationships between them and allowing for new insight to emerge.

Flow models are a great way of synthesizing user data form contextual inquiries. These models are specially useful to understand the jobs to be done in a human system, the workflows that come naturally to users, and where in the workflow lay the key pain points.

By consolidating sequence models created from several contextual observations and interviews, it becomes clear which parts of the sequence are shared across users and which ones are outliers or a hint that you've (yay, surprise!) discovered a new scenario to consider.

I use heuristic evaluations of competitors and legacy systems to better understand the expectations and frustrations of current customers.

The key to designing solutions to complex problems is to start by mapping and understanding the pieces of the problem.
While Flow Models allow us to understand how information passess hands in a system, sequence models organize thoseinteractions in time.

Sometimes you don't get to do all the research you'd want to. Instead, you get a laundry list of user stories from a client. In those cases I find it very useful to reorganize those stories into a narrative, maybe even draw a storyboard, and quickly validate the sequence with users to identify interaction priorities.

Sometimes you just need to jump online and quickly compare the effects of subtle design variations. Your users may not always consciously pick up the difference but they may react very differently to each version.

Understanding the role of secondary and supporting personas – such as Buyer and Data Provider personas– in the system can really help you make your primary persona's job easier.

We use user journey diagrams to map the expected/observed emotional state of users during different stages of their experience, these diagrams then inform when our system needs to be engaging, when it needs to be supportive and when it needs to just leave the user alone!

This is an amazing technique described by Jon Kolko in his book Well Designed that I've used when dealing with product suite designs.
This map helps understand the overall scope of a product vision and allow product teams to focus on specific branches of value at a time.

When redesigning a website: start with the basics! Content structure and overall layouts for content pages.

Mapping tasks that must be completed in the system with the 'responsible' persona. This map also accounts for tasks that must be completed outside the system.

Mapping different personae to their entry point to the system helps designers visualize persona interdependencies. It also helps developers identify database requirements, and lastly, it helps product managers sequence the work of the teams to deliver early value to key personas.

Often times in enterprise UX the user needs for same apparent workflow may actually vary a lot depending on the specific personas' goals, expectations, data access, organization size, etc.
These persona table allow me to keep track of common needs and identifiy outliers for each feature we work on.