Lauren Argenta
Design director at Thinkmill. Loves wireframing, all things user research, and solving complex problems using design and engineering collaboration.
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Core concepts
Core concepts are an expression of a project‘s underlying data model and relationships, translated into a written format that the team can build an aligned understanding on.
thinkmill method
Design Ethnography
Adopted from the world of Anthropology, Design Ethnography is a research method that captures everyday life to discover interesting and unseen user experience opportunities.
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Low-fidelity prototypes
Low-fidelity prototypes bring interactivity to functional wireframes to in order to test and better understand how a product or app needs to respond to user interaction.
thinkmill method
Functional wireframing
Functional wireframing documents how the various pages and interface elements of an app or website need to come together in order to support the user.
thinkmill method
Process mapping
Process mapping surfaces the movement of information and user interaction throughout a system in the form of a flowchart. It captures assumptions or current-state realities related to how the system works, and helps expedite alignment, design, and development,
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Playback
Playbacks are checkpoint updates to a wider audience than the core team. They share progress to garner feedback and ensure delivery aligns with expectations before proceeding further.
thinkmill method
User journey mapping
User journey mapping captures the steps a user takes to complete a specific task in the form of a flowchart. It surfaces assumptions about how the team expects a user to interact with the product, and highlights pain points and areas for improvement.
talk
How to establish multi-disciplinary teams to effectively design and build products
Lauren recently co-presented with Paul Merrell from Meld Studios at UX Australia 2022 about how Thinkmill & Meld established a multi-disciplinary team to effectively design and build a product.
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Engineering-led design
Lauren Argenta describes Thinkmill’s Engineering-led Design mindset, and the 5 behaviours that a cross-disciplinary team can adopt to make work life (and the software we make) better.
More posts from other Thinkmill voices
Optimise Your Context, Not Your Prompts
AI makes better engineering decisions when it can understand a project’s architecture, conventions and shared knowledge. Making that context clear and discoverable helps it produce software that fits the wider system.
· 5 min readWhere AI Actually Helps Quality Engineering
AI-assisted QA is not just about generating tests faster. By carrying product context through planning, development, review and release, AI can shorten feedback loops, surface risks earlier and help teams make better decisions, provided its output is supported by clear specifications, guardrails and human judgement.
· 3 min readWhy Great Engineering Still Wins
AI can write code faster than ever, but coding was never the hardest part. The organisations seeing the biggest gains are investing in engineering fundamentals that help both people and AI make better decisions.
· 3 min read
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