Category: Learning From Others

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

User Research With Small Business Owners: Best Practices and Considerations

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The majority of our work at Google has involved conducting user research with small business owners: the small guys that are typically defined by governmental organizations as having 100 or fewer employees, and that make up the majority of businesses worldwide. Given the many hurdles small businesses face, designing tools and services to help them succeed has been an immensely rewarding experience. That said, the experience has brought a long list of challenges, including those that come with small business

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Learning From Others / Process and Methods / Visual and Visible

Unleash Your Visual Superpower!

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From start-ups to banks, design has never been more central to business. Yet at conference after conference, I meet designers at firms talking about their struggle for influence. Why is that fabled “seat at the table” so hard to find, and how can designers get a chair? Designers yearn for a world where companies depend on their ideas but usually work in a world where design is just one voice. In-house designers often have to advocate for design priorities versus

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Learning From Others / Workplace and Career

Mentoring as an Investment

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Have you ever asked for an update on a project you’d invested a great deal of time and energy in, only to hear “they have completely redesigned it since then”? I did, and it left me with this very empty feeling. After some wallowing, I realized I needed to discover a new way to think about the way I work and what really matters in my consulting career. My answer: The mark of a truly good consultant is investing in

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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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Learning From Others / Process and Methods

Enhancing the Mind-Meld

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Which version of the ‘suspended account’ dashboard page do you prefer? Version A       Version B     Perhaps you don’t really care. Each one gets the job done in a clear and obvious way. However, as the UX architect of the ‘overview’ page for a huge telecom leader, it was my job to tell the team which treatment we’d be using. I was a freelancer with only four months tenure on this job, and in a company

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