Give yourself permission to practice UX every day Progress takes practice. You have to work at it every single day. Regardless of your circumstances, when you practice UX every day, you: Build empathy with your colleagues Better meet your customers’ needs Become more strategic in your approach Make more informed design decisions Resolve conflicts with [Keep Reading…]
User Experience Coaching for Drupal.org
Yesterday the Drupal Association announced that I will be their user experience coach for the reinvention of Drupal.org. It is such an honor to have been awarded the opportunity to guide their extensive user research and product strategy initiative over the next several months. Many organizations would prefer to outsource to agencies to solve their [Keep Reading…]
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…]
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…]
The truth about the presentation process
Having the opportunity to speak to an audience who cares what you have to say and believes they can learn something new from you is a totally surreal experience. Especially when you consider that months of work pours out of you in under an hour. I’ve been speaking at conferences since the fall of 2008. [Keep Reading…]
How to Conduct Yourself While Conducting Interviews
I spend most of my time these days coaching senior leaders and product teams on how to build empathy for their customers and colleagues. This is what my consulting business has evolved into over time. One of the tools we use are one-on-one interviews with stakeholders and customers. The goal is to discover the behaviors, [Keep Reading…]
What’s Your Problem? Putting Purpose Back into Your Projects
[This is the written form of my presentation What’s Your Problem? Putting Purpose Back into Your Projects] Our story begins in the 1980s at Procter & Gamble, the largest consumer goods company in the world. They make Bounty, and Mister Clean, and Dawn and lots of other brands you know and love. P&G was raking [Keep Reading…]
How “When I…” Reasoning Poisons a Team
Earlier this year I had a client who hired me to redesign the first step in their 3-step process. The page was getting loads of customer complaints and the last three iterations on the design hadn’t helped. As always, I started the project by interviewing key stakeholders: the product manager, the product owner, the head [Keep Reading…]
Why Guess? A Familiar Screenplay
CUT TO: INT. SCREEN SHARING MEETING – DAY A client shows their consultant the progress they’ve made on a redesign. They want the consultant’s feedback before it’s too late. CLIENT Currently the user does A, then B, then C. Now the user will be able to do C, then A, then B. We don’t think [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…]