Category: Career, Industry & Enterprise

Designing for clients, designing within enterprises, insights from conferences and events, and growing your career. Whether you are new to the design field, or an established professional, you’ll find inspiring guidance in these posts. And perhaps a few warnings of what to avoid.

Business Design / Foundational Thinking / Workplace and Career

Ending the UX Designer Drought

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The first article in this series, “A New Apprenticeship Architecture,” laid out a high-level framework for using the ancient model of apprenticeship to solve the modern problem of the UX talent drought. In this article, I get into details. Specifically, I discuss how to make the business case for apprenticeship and what to look for in potential apprentices. Let’s get started! Defining the business value of apprenticeship Apprenticeship is an investment. It requires an outlay of cash upfront for a

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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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Workplace and Career

Grow Your Career without Leaving Your Company

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When I wanted to make a career shift to information architecture, I was reluctant because I loved the team I worked with. So instead of leaving to find the right work, I tried to start doing it where I was. What follows are my recommendations on how to make similar moves. It’s not rocket science, but it’s always nice to get some reminders. The least rocket science-y part is the first: Set a goal. You can’t get to where you’re

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