Career, Industry & Enterprise Archives - Page 3 of 59

September 18, 2018 Business Design / Learning From Others

Trusting the Process

I am a firm believer that success starts with the statement of work (SOW). An appropriate and attainable SOW determines whether my team of UX designers and researchers get the time and activities we require to fully understand a client’s needs and fashion a suitable solution. Regrettably, we often work within overly prescriptive SOWs that dictate a solution before we have a chance to understand the problem. One reason projects are poorly scoped is our clients’ discomfort with ambiguity. Clients

July 17, 2018 Learning From Others / Workplace and Career

Biased by Design

Posted by Rachel Grossman

Back in the mid-90s, as the personal computer was booming, I was just your fairly average tween with a Skip-It™. I spent my summers in the California sunshine counting: 100, 208, 300, 986, always aching to get to 1,000. While my parents worked long past sunset, I played on the sidewalk of my parents’ company, Design Matters. Before it was a podcast, Design Matters—one of the first agencies in the San Francisco Bay area—was my personal experience with design. My

April 3, 2018 Business Design

How Large and Boutique Consultancies Can Partner for Better Design

Posted by Shanon Marks

Which is the better athlete: the marathoner or the sprinter? Both focus on hitting the finish line but possess far different skill sets. Yet any successful track and field team needs both types of athletes to win awards and recognition. Having a collection of overlapping and complementary skill sets makes any group better able to confidently achieve desirable outcomes. This same principle holds true when contemplating partnerships between giant management consultancies like Accenture, McKinsey & Co., Bain & Co., or

March 6, 2018 Workplace and Career

Are We Taking the “U” Out of UX?

Posted by Mark Richman

What is a UX designer? I recently saw a great ad for a senior UX specialist from MathWorks. Some excerpts: Work with the development team to follow a user-centered design approach as you work collaboratively to brainstorm and design innovative solutions to complex problems. Make recommendations to team members about which usability methods to use to answer their questions about users and design directions based on projects’ needs, goals, and constraints. Work closely with team members to conduct user research,

October 31, 2017 Foundational Thinking / Learning From Others

It’s a Bird, It’s A Plane, It’s a User Champion

Posted by Kevin Fenton

Like a superhero created when the contents of two beakers accidentally combine, a powerful hybrid has emerged in the software development world: the user champion. In this origin story, the beakers would be labeled “agile” and “user experience (UX)” because the user champion borrows some of the best ideas from both disciplines. From agile, it takes the idea of the product owner (or in this case, product champion). From UX, it takes a conviction in the value of user feedback.