Category: Process and Methods

Simplify your work and your life by learning the tools and techniques that authors have used to conquered gnarly problem spaces. From avoiding burnout to doing scrappy research on a shoestring budget, you’ll benefit from their experience, avoid making the mistakes they made, and go on to make all new mistakes of your own. (Then contribute your learnings back to us!)

Foundational Thinking / Process and Methods / User Centered

We Don’t Research. We Build.

Posted by

The following is a composite of experiences I’ve had in the last year when talking with startups. Some dialog is paraphrased, some is verbatim, but I’ve tried to keep it as true as possible and not skew it towards anyone’s advantage or disadvantage. As professionals in the user-centered design world, we are trained and inclined to think of product design as relying on a solid knowledge, frequently tested, of our potential users, their real-life needs and habits. We’ve seen the

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

Guerrilla Usability at Conferences

Posted by

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

Continue reading
Learning From Others / Process and Methods

The Creative Impact of Improvisation

Posted by

Improvisation is a very old and time-tested form of theater. The earliest use of improvisation is found in records of a Roman farce performed in 391 BC. Given its long history, it’s surprising to me that in our modern world, comedy–and comedic improvisation–is considered a low-brow form of entertainment. It is generally eschewed by the erudite. But it shouldn’t be. My own experience with improvisation spans 20+ years. And in the middle of that I took a hiatus from performing

Continue reading
Process and Methods / Workplace and Career

Building the In-house Design Agency

Posted by

The first article discussed the pros and cons of different UX team structures. For companies that depend on user experience for business success, a strong internal team is essential. But how do you get there from here? Having built one UX group from scratch and managed another 230+ person internal UX groups, I’ve learned a few tips, often the hard way, that can help. Making the case The hardest part of building an in-house design agency is answering the basic

Continue reading
Deliverables / Process and Methods

How to Breathe Life Into Personas

Posted by

Personas are essential when you are working on a project and don’t know the target audience very well. For instance, not every designer has experience in fashion or banking. Creating a model of your target audience may help you and your stakeholders feel significantly more empathy for those people. Personas can also help you get out of the mindset of thinking about users abstractly. “User” sounds like it does not refer to real people who have desires, concerns, past experiences.

Continue reading