design leadership

Does Minimalist UX Design Require Maximal Design Effort?

Short answer: usually. But it’s worth it. Here’s why. A friend of mine, who works in a field completely unrelated to new technology, recently asked me whether the advent of simple digital products and voice interaction would make the profession of user experience (UX) design obsolete. Clearly, he…

Is the Future of UX Design Super Minimal?

We’ve become accustomed to minimalist design in app and web design. But with the Internet of Things (IoT), the trend in user experience (UX) design is toward even more extreme minimalism, at least on consumer side. Consider a few of the most well-known IoT products out there – FitBit, Nest…

Co-Creating? A Little Emotional Intelligence Goes a Long Way

Last week I implored you to include your stakeholders in the creative process in terms of UX design. Now I’m going to share proven ways to actually do that. Stakeholders can offer designers invaluable insight on a project, but often it’s tough to get them to speak in-depth to share their knowledge…

6 Reasons Why You Should Co-Create

Stakeholders — the people or groups with the power to affect (or are affected by) your project — often have valuable opinions and insight that can positively impact the design of the user experience (UX) on your project. Perhaps they’re domain experts in the subject area relevant to your project.…

The Trick for Moving Clients Beyond Their Fixed Design Ideas

Often, clients — project owners that come to us seeking user experience (UX) design expertise — have “pre-designed” their project to some extent before our kickoff meeting. This can be very helpful and we encourage it. It means they’ve already done a lot of thinking on their project so it’s easy to…

Reduce UX Friction: Start with User Journeys, End with Successful Products

In user experience (UX) design, friction is understood to mean interactions that limit a person from achieving his or her goals in a digital interface in an easy and intuitive manner. For instance, say you’re buying something online. You want to edit your purchase right before the Confirmation…

4 UX Design Best Practices to Keep Your Team on Track

Using design best practices ensures your user experience (UX) design and development process is focused and efficient. These four best practices — ensuring visibility of the process, following logical steps, taking ownership of work, and communicating effectively — are…

In UX Design, Quality Hinges on Effective Micro-Decision Making

You start a new design project. Quickly, you need to make some big decisions about the strategy, overall concept, information architecture and layout templates. And you have to follow up by making even more decisions. What interaction patterns will you use? What elements should have animations?…

Want Your UX Design Project to Succeed? Include Stakeholders in the Process

How do you keep stakeholders informed and included during a user experience (UX) design process? Short answer: Be generous with representations — sketches, mockups and prototypes — right from day one of the design process. Yes, that’s right. I’m telling you that, in the context of tight budgets…

Use Design Thinking to Close More Deals

As a lead designer in our company, I evangelize design thinking and model the behavior of a design thinker. As a career designer, it’s tough for me to not apply design thinking to everything I do. So when our sales team asks me to support the pre-sales process on a prospective customer project, I…