They would… …value design, not design value. …seek out mentality, not ideas. …fund process, not product. …demand customer insights, not instincts. …prep for testing days, not demos days. …commission research, not follow trends. …study anthropology, sociology and psychology, not just management, economics and statistics. …foster collaboration, not competition. …care about people, not percentages. …cherish sign-ins, [Keep Reading…]
On Empathy and Apathy: Two Case Studies
The suffix -pathy means “feeling” or “suffering” The prefix em- means “within” or “inside” The prefix a- means “not” or “without” By definition, empathy is the opposite of apathy. Empathy is defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another” — within + feeling or inside + suffering. Apathy is defined as [Keep Reading…]
Knowing Why Beats Knowing How
Last year around this time, I started following an eating plan called The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss. At the same time, I was feverishly traveling the globe presenting my talk Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX. Midway through the book, Tim begins a chapter with a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson that draws a [Keep Reading…]
You’re not a user experience designer if…
The UX field is booming. It seems like the number of user experience practitioners has doubled in the last year — from newbies who’ve just entered the workforce, to mid-career changes, to folks who’ve been doing this all along but finally found out what to call themselves. It’s incredibly reassuring to finally see a long [Keep Reading…]
Why I detest the term “Lean UX”
Any user experience designer worth their salt takes the needs of the company they’re serving into account and adapts their approach accordingly — identifying the appropriate process, methods and tools to get the job done. This has been the case for as long as information architecture and interaction design have been in practice. Rigid methodology [Keep Reading…]
Designing for Startups in Smashing Magazine
A big thanks goes out to Andrew Maier whose article “Designing for Startups: How to Deliver the Message Across” in Smashing Magazine included some thoughts from a blog post I wrote a few months ago titled “A Plan of Action.” In it he features my three approaches to design: Reactive, Preactive, and Proactive — the [Keep Reading…]
Whit Hour – Week 21
Thank you so much to the ~28 people who showed up for the twenty-first week of Whit Hour — my weekly one-hour video chat to answer any and all of your questions about user experience, consulting, and whatever else you throw at me. Tune in every Monday night from 10-11pm Eastern Time at http://www.livestream.com/whithour. Whit [Keep Reading…]
A Plan of Action
“For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it?” — Luke 14:28 It’s not every day I quote the Bible. All the rarer that I quote from the New Testament, given the fact that I’m Jewish. But I happened [Keep Reading…]
Whit Hour – Week 19
Thank you so much to the ~26 people who showed up for the nineteenth week of Whit Hour — my weekly one-hour video chat to answer any and all of your questions about user experience, consulting, and whatever else you throw at me. Tune in every Monday night from 10-11pm Eastern Time at http://www.livestream.com/whithour. Whit [Keep Reading…]
If the product doesn’t work, its “user experience” doesn’t matter
I recently edited an article for UX Magazine (When You Startup with UX) in which I interviewed four startups on what User Experience means to them. Of all the things that people said, the quote that stood out to me the most was from Mike Singleton, a developer at Foursquare: “…when you only have three [Keep Reading…]