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 / Learning From Others / Workplace and Career

Reorgs: Rocky or Righteous?

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As designers, we grapple every day with challenging projects. This of course is part of what keeps us coming back. Some challenges, although not directly related to project work, can still be looked at through a UX lens. In this case, I’m talking about a phenomenon you’re likely familiar with: company reorganization. If you’ve been through a reorg (that’s ‘reorganization’ in water cooler parlance), you’ve probably experienced your share of the whispers, closed-door meetings, and mixed messages that seem to

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Business Design / Foundational Thinking / Workplace and Career

Ending the UX Designer Drought

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The user experience design field is booming. We’re making an impact, our community is vibrant, and everyone has a job. And that’s the problem. A quick search for “user experience” on indeed.com reveals over 5,000 jobs posted in the last 15 days (as of March 15, 2014) in the United States alone! Simple math turns that into the staggering statistic of 10,000 new UX-related jobs being created every month. This amount of work going undone is going to prevent us

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Foundational Thinking / Learning From Others

Siri, Chess, and Prostheses

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Intelligent machines. There was a time when the mere mention of artificial intelligence was wrapped in constant debate and triggered images of Hollywood-crafted products, like Hal 9000. The concept itself is quite controversial; it challenges human thought as Darwin once challenged human origins. But we moved on, and now we carry these intelligent machines in our pockets. There’s a 38.9% chance you have one, too. Siri, the out-of-sight personal assistant from Apple, delivers an amazing experience. It listens to you,

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Learning From Others / Workplace and Career

Evolving a Creative Workplace: Step 8

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That old cliché isn’t true: all good things don’t have to come to an end. It’s possible to prepare your team for ongoing success and growth, but you have to be smart about how you do it. In this series I’ve shared what’s worked for us at Intuitive Company. How we thought of our team as an organic garden and realized that once we had all of the right elements established, we didn’t need to mess with things too much.

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

Guerrilla Usability at Conferences

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Does your company have display booths at trade shows and conferences? Typically, these are marketing-dominated efforts, but if you make the case to travel, working the booth can be used for user research. Here’s how I’ve done it. Positioning and justification At times it can be a hard internal sell to justify the costs and diversions to take your one- or two-person show on the road, all the while piggybacking off of another department’s efforts. Yet, standing on your feet

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