“It’s just going to be a lot more work.”

It came out as almost a whine. The developer who said it had spent the past 4 minutes, by my watch, proposing an easier method of building a feature. I empathized and sympathized.

We were pushing up against a deadline. The…

While I was recently pondering UX processes and methods, I began to play with the idea of running through a complete UX process. You know, the kind that are always glorified in those glamorous diagrams from some organizing body. …

Tell me about your design process.

That seems to be a question, or rather a prompt, encountered in every UX interview. I’ve asked it and have been asked it many times.

I stopped asking it years ago because it lacks substance. It’s a lobbed ball that barely makes it over…

UX advocacy. We often throw this phrase around as designers. I’ve even seen it listed in job descriptions.

But what do we really mean by this? And why is it that our profession seems to be one of the few that feels the need to self-promote in this way? Developers…

Koan #15

Have you ever corrected a user or client in a research session? Perhaps they misstated a process or the method of completing a task. Or maybe their mental model was completely wrong.

In his book, Interviewing Users, Steve Portigal writes of his encounter with this scenario. He was…

It was one of those weeks where the design wasn’t going so well. I had what I thought what a good design. But it wasn’t quite working for me. …

The tomato was about the size of a softball — much larger and better than anything I could have found at the local grocer. It sat next to a beautifully ripe box of cherry tomatoes. …

I ran across a tweet from Jared Spool where he stated he sometimes receives critiques of websites or applications from other designers. You can probably imagine someone like him receiving an in-depth critique of some site like Facebook or Amazon where the designer tears it down bit by bit. …