Design Thoughts / User Experience

I spoke this week at a General Assembly Q&A session with 25 freshly minted graduates from their UX course. Many of the questions centred around how to structure portfolios ready for interview, how design at Atlassian works and how to break into the UX and design industry. 1 question really stood out to me. “As a designer, what’s the hardest… Read More ￫

Customer journey maps with the intent of proto-personas In Using Proto-Personas for Executive Alignment, Jeff Gothelf writes: “Proto-personas give an organization a starting point from which to begin evaluating their products and to create some early design hypotheses. They’re also helpful in initiating and reinforcing corporate awareness of the customer’s point of view to ensure it’s included in strategic planning…. Read More ￫

It’s not “sexy” but who says it can’t be? Complexity and ambiguity can offer valuable moments for inspiring beautiful novelty in enterprise UX. It’s 2015. As I gaze back upon my circuitous career path, for over a dozen years, I’ve largely designed for desktop virtualization, corporate financials, and now cloud analytics for IT admins. B2B. Verticals. Enterprise. Whoa. It wasn’t… Read More ￫

Part I: Experience is everything The origin of imagination Around 70,000 years ago, Sapiens figuratively ate an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, and a mutation occurred that scientists still can’t explain to this day. According to Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, new ways of thinking and communicating… Read More ￫

In June 2012, while working at CNN.com, I was tasked with designing the user experience of election night. The next five months of my life would be dedicated to that single night—but success to me had nothing to do with who won. I was concerned with findability, data visualization, a shape-shifting canvas, and how the hell mouse-over flyouts were going… Read More ￫

Why UX design has to evolve to stay relevant in the future Since the early 90s, when the term User Experience was brought to wider knowledge, the UX design profession has been dealing with a lot of key challenges. Besides new emerging roles accompanied by an increasing amount of new — and sometimes rather confusing — job titles, UX has mainly been struggling with… Read More ￫

It’s any given day. Your inbox is full of newsletters telling you about the fresh new ways to improve your forms or that a new UX technique earned loads of money for someone and so on. You’re excited right? You read the article and can’t wait to find a way of implementing it in your next project/sprint/meeting. But how does… Read More ￫

I’m not much of a designer. In fact, I’m awful at it. I am, however, interested in how it’s done. I read and write plenty about customer success; along the way, (somehow) I found Samuel Hulick’s site UserOnboard. His detailed descriptions of the user onboarding process in popular apps give designers an idea about how some of the most successful… Read More ￫

Empathy maps are a powerful tool for helping teams better understand users. But that doesn’t mean they are perfect. You should feel free to adapt them to your circumstances. As user experience professionals we face two significant challenges. Getting our colleagues to think about the needs of users and ensuring they don’t forget about them. There are many techniques for… Read More ￫

The Agile approach has in many organisations become the expected way of working. There have been many articles and books around the challenges of designing in an agile environment. When building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) there are many competing factors, and with the pressure to release something demoable every sprint, features can get compromised in a way that requires… Read More ￫