As the workforce decentralizes through the increased availability of remote employment options, teams have to learn to compensate for the lack of in-person collaboration to tackle the daily work challenges. Currently, I am the Senior UX Designer for my division and am based in the United States along with our Program Managers, Leadership and Stakeholders, reporting to my Product team based in Europe, and handing over designs to the Development, based in India. However, just because the team is not
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What happens in the end-to-end experience? Can the intended audience find what they’re looking for? What is the actual problem being solved? Are you designing the right product for the customer need? Information architecture, accessibility, findability, taxonomy, interaction design, research, usability, case studies, interviews, surveys, and more.
Flawed Products Harm – A Framework to Respond
Technology products are embedded in every aspect of daily life from homes, cars, phones, schools, workplaces. They’re in entertainment, healthcare, safety, and beyond. While technology is often billed as making things easier, faster, cheaper, and fairer, it can cause harm at scale. People face frustration, harassment, financial loss, physical harm, and more. What are “Flawed products?” Flawed products are products, services, and technologies developed without considering, including, and understanding the needs of underserved consumers expected to buy and use them.
Continue readingForget the Trail of Breadcrumbs
Enterprises often have a simplistic understanding of navigational structures in UX Design. Companies shy away from messing with known organizational schemas for fear that their users or customers will become confused and run away. We don’t give our users enough credit. As a result, most software navigational structures either reflect hierarchical departmental company/brand organization (because how can users be confused by that?), or a very top-heavy list of bucketed themes loosely based on general product “themes” (hello Amazon!).
Continue readingTaxonomies: Connecting Users to Content
Taxonomies may be thought of as hierarchies of categories to group and organize information to be found when browsing, or as a structured set of terms used to tag content so that it can be retrieved efficiently and accurately. Sometimes the same taxonomy may serve both purposes, and sometimes two different taxonomies are used, one for each purpose, for the same content or site. Taxonomies are not new, in fact there has been a lot written about them, including an
Continue readingFocus on Usage Maturity: Part III
Using a Usage Maturity Matrix to Make Design and Strategy Decisions Early Foundations You may recall from earlier installments in this series, that usage maturity is a measure of users’ comfort and familiarity with, and degree of use of, a product, process or place. During our master’s capstone research at Kent State, my project partner and I explored the varied levels of usage maturity of participants using Apple’s voice assistant Siri and found usage maturity did not coincide with participants’
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