Hi. I'm David Riethof.

8 guiding Principles & Processes

• UX is destructive and disruptive.

  In UX and content strategy, we go from research to insight to ideation to evaluation to execution. The first 4 comprise user-centered design, where nothing is sacred and everything is called into question. It's destructive and disruptive... in a good way!

• Design is about problem solving.

  Above all, I consider myself a business problem solver. How do I help clients increase revenue and traffic on their site? Decrease support calls? Good design and content can dramatically transform the way you do business online.

• What's your UX and content vision?

  What content and features should your site have? Which are most important to your customers? What do you work on first? I help clients develop a clear vision of exactly where their site should be in 2 years—and an achievable plan for getting there.

• Alignment–the biggest challenge.

  The biggest challenge in any project is how to articulate a design problem, align a group of stakeholders, then decide what a team is going to build. The rest, as they say, is just details (though depite the aphorism, details do matter. A lot).

• Research + Insights = Success

  In any project, there's an endless list of things you could work on. But to solve the right problems, you need insights, and these only come from research: analytics, usabilty testing, and heuristic analyses. There's no shortcuts.

• If they can't find it, they can't buy it.

  I'm an expert at solving tough findabilty problems. I start by helping clients organize and label their sites based on how their customers think. My toolkit: site taxonomies, enterprise search, type ahead strategy, navigation, and faceted browsing.

• Design your data and content too!

  Today's PIM and CMS-based content is published dynamically on multiple devices and 3rd party sites. This requires a new way of thinking about content. Now it's all about structure and tagging and content and data modeling. Are you ready?

• If you're not testing, you're just guessing.

  Want to save time and money? Then do remote usabilty testing—early and often! It's the cheapest, fastest, and most quantitaive way to test your designs and catch big usabilty problems before they become big business and customer problems.