“Designers shouldn’t ALSO have to code!” This is a refrain I hear a lot. Some designers feel working with code is too complex; others that it is exploitative. They are not wrong. But prototyping is a transformative practice with profound implications for design. Contributing to a prototype opens new ways of communicating with users and […]
If we, as designers, don’t fight to end the design handoff sh** show, then who will? Project handoff is one of the most inefficient and painful steps in software development. Designers and developers both hate it. Handoff leads to a false antagonism between design and development teams. Designers fight to “be in the room”, but […]
Prototyping is a simple (not easy) catalyst for transformative change in UX I recently stumbled across a 2008 article from David Verba, “Sketching in code: the magic of prototyping.” In this article he shares the benefits that prototyping brought to his projects. “With prototypes” he wrote, “the focus is always on the application and making […]
Why I moved on from Figma This is not an anti-Figma post. We need many tools and processes for the many designers and design challenges out there. This is a post describing why I no longer user Figma, and what process is more efficient for me. My work is a particular flavor of UX and Design: […]
How Agile leaves design out, and what we can do about it. You might not guess it from the title of this article, but I love Agile. I work in UX, I lead web projects, and I never want to go back to the time before Agile. Why the headline, then? Because, in addition to being […]
Using ‘No Handoff’ to integrate design and development. Background We are all familiar with project handoff: that universally hated period of inefficiency, disruption, and blame. Your precious work gets thrown over the fence, or you catch something that doesn’t make sense and have to do it anyway. Agile practices disrupted the handoff between developers, leadership, […]
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Is your company using UX to offload their discomfort with ambiguity? I recently stumbled across an article about Dark Matter with this absolute gem of an opener: “In our search for cosmic signals of dark matter, we could be likened to drunkards looking for lost keys beneath lampposts, where the light shines the brightest…. What […]
Innovation is on our minds these days, every company wants to generate great ideas and capitalize on them. A successful innovation strategy, though, is a complex endeavor involving the entire organization. Here I want to focus on three ways that User Experience and Design can help minimize risk and reap big rewards in your innovation […]
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Have you ever worked with one of those people who are simply hostile to design? They make sweeping statements about design wasting time. They claim, without proof, that everyone agrees with them. You’ve probably met an anti-design crusader. If they are a spectator it’s an annoyance, but what if they are an important stakeholder? Maybe […]
Read More… from Strategies for dealing with stakeholders who are hostile to design.
I built a research repository in Jira and wanted to get my process down in writing for those in the same boat I was in: weighing the pros and cons of Jira without a guide. UX repositories are critical, but selecting the right platform for your organization is not easy. Since I created our repository […]
Read More… from Using Jira as a research repository, part one: pros & cons