Process: Ideation

As UX designers, each of us has our own practices and techniques that can help us to successfully do the work we do every day. Although some techniques are in wide use and everyone from the oldest veteran to the newest rookie knows them, others may be the secrets of a particular organization and gain broader adoption over time.

At some point, all of us will most likely need to come up with our own additions to our UX design toolkit—whether that means devising our own techniques or adapting the techniques of others. In this article, I’ll share three new ideas that you might add to your toolkit. My hope is that they could make your everyday life as a UX designer a little bit easier. Read More

This is a sample chapter from the book Communicating the UX Vision: 13 Anti-Patterns That Block Good Ideas, by Martina Schell and James O’Brien. 2015 Morgan Kaufmann.

Chapter 16: Group Design Techniques

To get you started with group design workshop formats, we have collected our most-used techniques for building better products and services with the whole team. There are hundreds of great workshop formats that could easily fill another book, so this is just a small selection of group design formats that we use most often in our day-to-day design practices.

Facilitating a group can be challenging and mentally exhausting. If you are new to facilitation, start small and find a partner who can support you—another member of your creative group can be a great backup or give you the ability to split the group into two for some tasks, so you can concentrate on a smaller number of people. Read More

In Part 1 of this two-parter within my larger series on applied UX strategy, I wrote about the composition and structure of UX design teams. Now, in Part 2, I’ll cover two other areas of focus that are essential in making UX design an integral part of the development process and achieving success in a highly competitive marketplace:

• leaders
• culture

Leaders

When thinking about UX leaders, many people might imagine somebody like Jony Ive. But having a lone regent of design is usually neither possible nor necessary. As an organization grows, a single UX leader is rarely able to deal with the massive number and broad variety of projects and tasks. A UX leader must be deeply engaged in ongoing projects to make smart decisions. This is hard to do when a company makes many products. Plus, someone outside a product team would have limited influence on that team. When a UX leader is spread thin, day-to-day project tasks often take higher priority over long-term strategy. Read More