As digital products grow in complexity, there comes a need for a businesses to start dividing up responsibility across cross-functional teams. These divisions of responsibility, while necessary, usually end up creating communication barriers in the organization (Edmondson, 2012), better known as “silos”. Within each of those teams are cross-disciplinary members…

Much of our work as user experience designers is understanding the whys and why nots of our audiences’ decision making. In a previous post, I explored why people decide to switch or stay with products, focusing mainly on circumstances, the “where” and “when” of a job. The circumstances in which…

Designing for education can be challenging, yet extremely rewarding. Knowing that every time a student engages with your product they will get just a little bit smarter and closer to their aspirations bring a true sense of purpose. This incremental growth that you and other designers of educational experiences have…

As UX practitioners, usability studies are commonplace. However, articulating our findings in a way that effectively describes the urgency of the issues to be acted on is not always straightforward. …

As a manager of User Experience Designers, one of my jobs is to encourage them to come up with experimentation methods for gaining the most amount of learning for the least amount of time and effort. Doing this keeps our iteration cycles lean allowing us to act on our learnings…

Knowing that you built a better mousetrap, or in this case a shoelace, why do people fail to switch? …

As I’ve let go of being an individual contributor and focused my time towards a more formal leadership role, I’ve developed an appreciation for the art of conversation amongst product teams. Conversations are a critical part of an organization’s toolbox. On average, people have 1.2 meetings per day. Managers have…

Two of the biggest troublemakers that can impact your product design project are a lack of team alignment and a lack of awareness of feasibility. In this article, I will reference these two scoundrels as “The What” and “The How”. The What: a lack of stakeholder alignment on the requirements…

In the following series of articles, I will unpack various personal experiences that I have come across, and what I’ve been doing to help alleviate some of the issues that I’ve been confronted with. There is more to “Design” than pretty pictures on the screen. It runs much deeper. It…