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!)

Deliverables / Foundational Thinking / Learning From Others / Process and Methods

UX One-liners

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A little background to start: I’ve had the honor of working as a designer-in-residence for General Assembly’s User Experience Design Immersive Pilot Program (UXDI) from June through July. Our team built, launched, and taught a UX course 5-days a week, 8-hours a day, for 8-weeks straight.  It was quite the challenging, yet rewarding experience. However, learning from our approach, I found something about the way we bring people into the fold that we can stand to improve. We instructors spent

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Agile/Lean UX / Process and Methods

The UX Professionals’ Guide to Working with Agile Scrum Teams

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The adoption of Agile software development approaches are on the rise across our industry, which means UX professionals are more likely than ever to support Agile projects. Many UX professionals seem stymied by the challenge of effectively integrating UX within an Agile development framework–but there are others in our field who have encountered the same problems yet are finding effective solutions. I first encountered Agile Development in 2005, when a team I supported was chosen to help pilot Scrum development

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Design Principles / Foundational Thinking / Learning From Others

Emotional Design with A.C.T. – Part 2

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Back in Part 1, we looked at how the emotions expressed by people and products communicate personality traits over time. We also learned that customers are attracted to things that have an aesthetic personality that’s similar to their own,1 but they prefer products that take on a complementary role during interaction.2 In Part 2, we’ll look at how relationships are formed when people interact with products over time, and we’ll explore how people experience the emotion of “love.” Then, we’ll examine how

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Design Principles / Visual and Visible

In Defense of Floppy Disks: The Vocabulary of the Interface

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I work on interfaces used by college students to search for academic articles. Librarians buy these databases. Librarians happen to be wonderful clients to build products for because they always let you know what they don’t like. A few years ago, my department started hearing complaints about the “save” icon on our interface. The librarians were concerned that, since college students had never seen floppy disks, they wouldn’t know what the icon meant. In the next round of user testing,

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Design Principles / Discovery, Research, and Testing / Foundational Thinking / Learning From Others / Social UX

Researching User Experience: A Knowledge Ecology Model

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When we think of learning environments, we think of books, lectures, databases perhaps. But in my recent research, I discovered that the interactions we have with people in our networks play an even more important role in what we learn and how we turn information into actionable knowledge. All of the people in my study were learning how to be lecturers and how to progress their careers after spending considerable amounts of time as practitioners in a variety of industries such

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