Category: Process and Methods

Simplify your work and your life by learning the tools and techniques that authors have used to conquered gnarly problem spaces. From avoiding burnout to doing scrappy research on a shoestring budget, you’ll benefit from their experience, avoid making the mistakes they made, and go on to make all new mistakes of your own. (Then contribute your learnings back to us!)

Design Principles

Plateaus are Harder Than Mountains

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Bold claims have been made about applying “big data” to solve the world’s problems, from health (Fitbit) to saving energy (Nest). Data is all around us, appearing in slick devices and colorful dashboards, yet focusing on the technology can cause us to miss the people who have to use it. Our job as designers is to communicate information. A clean design with big numbers and charts looks good, but how can we make sure people actually understand the data? Designing

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Design Principles / Interfaces / Learning From Others / Visual and Visible

When Information Design is a Matter of Life or Death

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In 2008, Lloyds Pharmacy conducted 20 minute interviews1 with 1,961 UK adults. Almost one in five people admitted to having taken prescription medicines incorrectly; more than eight million adults have either misread medicine labels or misunderstood the instructions, resulting in them taking the wrong dose or taking medication at the wrong time of day. In addition, the overall problem seemed to be more acute among older patients. Almost one in five people admitted to having taken prescription medicines incorrectly; more

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Agile/Lean UX / Discovery, Research, and Testing

The Right Way to Do Lean Research

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StartX, a nonprofit startup accelerator, recently devoted an entire day to the role of design in early-stage companies. One panel included Laura Klein, Todd Zaki-Warfel, Christina Wodtke, and Mike Long. Each panelist had made their mark on how design is done in start-ups: Laura wrote the influential O’Reilly book on UX for Lean Startups, and Todd penned the bestselling Rosenfeld Media Prototyping book. Christina has been cross-teaching design to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship to designers at institutions such as California College

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Discovery, Research, and Testing / Learning From Others / Process and Methods / User Centered

User Experience Research at Scale

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An important part of any user experience department should be a consistent outreach effort to users both familiar and unfamiliar. Yet, it is hard to both establish and sustain a continued voice amongst the business of our schedules. Recruiting, screening, and scheduling daily or weekly one-on-one walkthroughs can be daunting for someone in a small department having more than just user research responsibilities, and the investment of time eventually outweighs the returns as both the number of participants and size

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Deliverables / Process and Methods

Forms: The Complete Guide—Part 4

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In which we take a look at selection-dependent inputs, and see that they’re a lot more simple to put together than they look. Forms. They’re often the bane of users’ online lives. But it doesn’t look like they’re going away any time soon. So its up to us, UX designers, to make them as smooth and easy to use as possible for our users while still reaching the best business outcomes. If we prototype our forms, we can get them

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