My unusual upbringing begins as an Indian in Austria, winds through years fronting a band in venues across Europe and later finds me falling down the side of incredibly steep coffee plantations in Nicaragua on buying trips as a coffee roaster. These strange twists and adventures have bestowed me with an unusual array of skills, and have helped me become a more well-rounded UX researcher, capable of empathising with people from all corners of the earth. These include: playing a screaming electric guitar, coffee roasting, customer service that abandons bravado and favours active listening, sales and account acquisition, equipment maintenance and setup, improving morale, storytelling, content development, prototyping and learning when to stop talking and start listening.
Through all of it, I want to get at the heart of what it is to be human. To embrace all the commonalities and the differences between us to create products that bring us together, yet also allow us to express ourselves individually and meaningfully. I love design that is unnoticeable at first and only unveils itself after use. On any given day you might hear me preaching: if it can’t be used by its target users, then no hex code in the world can save it.
Work history
UX Designer
- Chicago, United StatesFull Time
I worked on 5 incredibly intense and comprehensive design projects that covered a huge spectrum. Three were academic product design projects over 4 week periods which required in-depth quantitative and qualitative explorations of the existing market as well as user research and usability testing at every turn. These academic pursuits required me to develop and master a huge range of skills in the pursuit of the perfect design solution, and included conducting in-depth competitive analyses, SWOT analyses, heuristic evaluations, domain research, user research, usability testing, paper prototyping using POP/Marvel, high–,mid– and low–fidelity prototyping using Axure, Sketch and InVision. I also constantly had to communicate findings and defend my design decisions effectively, at every stage of the iterative, agile design process to our creative directors using user insights as collateral.
I was also privileged to have been involved in two incredibly intense and enlightening client-based professional experiences. These sensitised me to the importance of being able to communicate the undeniable value of UX research. I was able to constantly justify the UX process from creating personas, customer journey maps or even design principles by actually producing tangible MVPs from them. I learned how to empathise and work with a client’s KPIs and always tried to show how my improved design would increase those. In short - I took a huge leap out of my life in London to truly learn and immerse myself in this incredibly valuable and largely overlooked part of the design field. I have emerged confident and excited at the prospect of continuing to help companies produce products and services for the people who need and want them most. Have a look at my portfolio if you would like to learn about my UX work in more depth (medium.com/nicolefermie).
Skills
- Axure
- Sketch
- Zeplin
- Principle
- Invision
- Marvel
- Customer Journey
- Rapid Prototpying
- Contextual Inquiries
- Competitive Analysis
Education
BSc Biology
Bath, United Kingdom
BSc (hons) Biology.
MSc Psychology (Science, Culture and Communication)
- Bath, United Kingdom
MSc (Psychology) Science, Culture and Communication.