All startups start with an idea, a founder’s desire to invent something new. They invest time and money into bringing the idea to life, and a series of thoughts become a product. But more often than not, these thoughts are instincts, not insights. And eventually the product fails. Design turns an invention into a solution. [Keep Reading…]
Archives for 2013
War Stories: Stories of War
[Originally published in the series War Stories on Steve Portigal’s All This Chittah Chattah] I interviewed Holocaust survivors. Four words that still send shivers down my spine. Their stories were meant to shape my research; they ended up shaping me. It was the project of a lifetime. I was asked to conduct user research for [Keep Reading…]
Would You Treat Them Differently?
All of our minds are filled with things that no one else will ever know. “If you could stand in someone else’s shoes, hear what they hear, see what they see, feel what they feel, would you treat them differently?” This is the question asked by the Cleveland Clinic, one of the top hospitals in [Keep Reading…]
Customers First
Choose Your Customers First, said Seth Godin in his post yesterday. “First figure out who you’d like to do business with, then go make something just for them.” It’s a message I’ve been evangelizing for the past year: define the problem before devising the solution. Research > Strategy > Design. If you don’t know why [Keep Reading…]
Speak and Be Seen
I’m thrilled to have been invited to contribute a piece to Ladies in Tech, a new site celebrating and supporting female speakers in technology. Published today, Speak and Be Seen is a deeply personal story of how I first got involved in public speaking and the massive fears I’ve had to overcome along the way. [Keep Reading…]
Is Empathy “Women’s Work”?
In late 2010, I studied the number of women at high-profile startups, and found that if a startup employed women at all, it was far more often in a “selling” role than in a “making” one. That’s quite a disadvantage for companies whose customer base is primarily women. Despite Etsy’s news last month that they’d [Keep Reading…]
“I Don’t Have Time to Lead”
I considered it a personal failure when I learned that a client team I’ve been coaching for the last several months has recently been working on deliverables without my knowledge. They haven’t asked for feedback and it hasn’t appeared on any project schedules. Where did I go wrong? In a chat with the product manager, [Keep Reading…]
Help me compile my greatest hits
I’m in the process of creating a new homepage that will do a much better job of surfacing old (and still relevant) content, provide easier access to resources and organize my writing from the last five years. In determining what to highlight, I’d love to get feedback from my readers (you!). What are your favorite [Keep Reading…]
Empathy is the Core of Design Thinking
David Kelley is the founder and chairman of IDEO, probably the world’s best-known design innovation consultancy. Though not quite a household name, Kelley has arguably made as much of an impact on the field of design as the late Steve Jobs — in fact, it was under Kelley’s leadership that IDEO designed the first mouse [Keep Reading…]
The User Experience Process for the Seamless iPad App
The Data One week after Seamless, the leading online food ordering service, released their first iPad app in March 2012, the app hit #1 in the App Store’s Lifestyle category. Today it maintains 4.5 stars with more than 6,000 ratings and reviews. “By far the best menu application available for iPad…” “I couldn’t imagine not [Keep Reading…]
