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.

Design Principles / Workplace and Career

Designing for Harmony

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In 1982, Scott Cook was watching his wife sit at the kitchen table struggling to balance the family checkbook. Personal computers were just becoming popular and he had seen them transform work at Procter and Gamble; yet here was his wife fighting to do something challenging for humans but trivial for computers. In a flash of insight, he realized that software could replace pencil-and-paper accounting for everyone. This aha moment set him on a path of user-focused innovation. Cook met

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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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Foundational Thinking / Learning From Others

Teaching/Learning UX: Considerations for Academic-Industry Partnerships

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Higher education is poised to help produce the next generation of user experience designers, but we can’t do it alone. In the wake of Fred Beecher’s recent “Ending the UX Designer Drought” and studies by Onward Search, UserTesting, and the Nielsen Norman Group, it is clear that the UX market is booming and that UX designers enjoy a high level of job satisfaction. It is also clear that too few UX professionals exist to meet current demand. And while apprenticeship

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Business Design / Discovery, Research, and Testing / Workplace and Career

UX Researcher: A User’s Manual

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This article is a guide on what to expect, and how to get the most from your UX researcher–a user manual, if you will. You will invest a lot in your researcher and you deserve the greatest return. You should have high expectations for this critical component of your UX team, and following the recommendations presented in this article will help maximize your return. A long and prosperous future Congratulations on hiring a user experience design researcher!  When maintained correctly,

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Foundational Thinking / Workplace and Career

Redesign Democracy: Dare to Think Big

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Why are you in UX? It probably isn’t to get rich. Yes, there is plenty of money in being a UX professional today. If you’re competent, you should be enjoying a very nice lifestyle. But we do this not for money–being on the business side would be far better at achieving that goal. We do it for creative reasons, expressive reasons, quality of life reasons, perhaps even altruistic reasons. Yet, despite the broader motivations we share for choosing our vocation,

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