Category: Foundational Thinking

Boxes and Arrows has been serving the user experience and information architecture community since 2001. Along the way, some pretty big ideas have been developed here by people who are now leaders in the industry. We hope you’ll find inspiration in these posts.

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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Foundational Thinking

Intent to Solve

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When we’re building products for people, designers often do something called “needs finding” which translates roughly into “looking for problems in users’ lives that we can solve.” But there’s a problem with this. It’s a widely held belief that, if a company can find a problem that is bad enough, people will buy a product that solves it. That’s often true. But sometimes it isn’t. And when it isn’t true, that’s when really well designed, well intentioned products can fail

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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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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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Foundational Thinking / Learning From Others / Process and Methods / Visual and Visible

How to Make a Concept Model

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I can draw. I went to art school. I studied painting until I fell out with the abstract expressionists and switched to photography. But I can draw. What I cannot do is diagram. I always wanted to. I have models in my head all the time of how things work. But when it comes time to make a visual model of those ideas, I can’t figure out to to represent them. I find myself resorting to pre-existing models like four-squares

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