Recent Posts

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

Online Surveys On a Shoestring: Tips and Tricks

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Design research has always been about qualitative techniques. Increasingly, our clients ask us to add a “quant part” to projects, often without much or any additional budget. Luckily for us, there are plenty of tools available to conduct online surveys, from simple ones like Google Forms and SurveyMonkey to more elaborate ones like Qualtrics and Key Survey. Whichever tool you choose, there are certain pitfalls in conducting quantitative research on a shoestring budget. Based on our own experience, we’ve compiled

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Foundational Thinking

Intent to Solve

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When we’re building products for people, designers often do something called “needs finding” which translates roughly into “looking for problems in users’ lives that we can solve.” But there’s a problem with this. It’s a widely held belief that, if a company can find a problem that is bad enough, people will buy a product that solves it. That’s often true. But sometimes it isn’t. And when it isn’t true, that’s when really well designed, well intentioned products can fail

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Design Principles / Discovery, Research, and Testing

Creativity Must Guide the Data-Driven Design Process

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Collecting data about design is easy in the digital world. We no longer have to conduct in-person experiments to track pedestrians’ behavior in an airport terminal or the movement of eyeballs across a page. New digital technologies allow us to easily measure almost anything, and apps, social media platforms, websites, and email programs come with built-in tools to track data. And, as of late, data-driven design has become increasingly popular. As a designer, you no longer need to convince your

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Discovery, Research, and Testing / Process and Methods

A Beginner’s Guide to Web Site Optimization—Part 3

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Web site optimization has become an essential capability in today’s conversion-driven web teams. In Part 1 of this series, we introduced the topic as well as discussed key goals and philosophies. In Part 2, I presented a detailed and customizable process. In this final article, we’ll cover communication planning and how to select the appropriate team and tools to do the job. Communication For many organizations, communicating the status of your optimization tests is an essential practice. Imagine if your team has just launched an A/B

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Design Principles / Process and Methods

Mystical Guidelines for Creating Great User Experiences

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The Jewish Torah teaches that the Creator created our world through ten utterances–for example, “let there be light.” The Jewish mystical tradition explains that these utterances correspond with ten stages in the process of creation. Every creative process in the world ultimately follows this progression, because it is really a part of the continual unfolding of the world itself, in which we are co-creators. This article aims to present an overview of the mystical process of creation and principal of

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