Something to think about. How much of what you consume each day is speculative or predictive? How little of it is based in fact or supported by some level of evidence?
Consider television or cable news, for example. Whether you follow a conservative, liberal or independent station, the format is…
The prediction engine is gaining momentum and will undoubtedly be running at full speed by the end of the year (and through the beginning of next year). There will be big headlines and articles stuffed with subheadings listing out the trends you can expect to see in the new year…
A designer tells her product manager that the feature requested by the client will take 7 working days to complete. It will require some thought and possibly some research, she states. The product manager asks if it isn’t possible to get it done in 3 days, instead. He explains there…
A few years ago, a friend of mine, Nancy, lost her job. To put it more bluntly, she was fired. It was her first job out of school and she had the misfortune of hiring into an extremely bad culture.
The company had put Nancy in a number of difficult…
“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. …
