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…]
Foreword to Digital Product Management
Digital Product Management: Design websites and mobile apps that exceed expectations written by Kristofer Layon was published by New Riders earlier this year. It’s a wonderful book on the product management process, from understanding the market and defining your value, to prioritizing features and creating a roadmap, to testing an MVP and measuring your success. [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…]
Give Your Team a UX Jump-Start
Craft a product strategy and design framework using the principles and techniques of user experience…in two days. Are you being told what to build, but you don’t agree it’s what your customers need? Is your feature list out of control, but you can’t figure out how to pare it down? Are members of your team [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…]
If VCs Understood UX…
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…]
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…]
New Year’s Resolutions for 2011
New Year’s Resolutions get a bad rap, and many say they’re trite and futile. I couldn’t disagree more. Setting goals, especially challenging ones, is the best way to effectively change behavior. A resolution is a commitment to oneself, and I can’t think of a more honorable and necessary thing for a human to do than [Keep Reading…]
You are in context to another
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to define your audience, how to name them. We all know that if you design for everyone, you end up designing for no one. But demarcating a group of people can be a real struggle, especially since people exhibit different behaviors in different situations — one of [Keep Reading…]
What are you worth?
Perhaps not coincidentally, I had two totally separate conversations on Sunday within the same theme: how much should I charge? Later that day I tweeted: Several folks responded that they’d like to hear more about my reflection in a blog post, so here it is. One conversation was with a friend who’s interviewing for a [Keep Reading…]