Design critiques are an important part of any product exploration. A good design critique is meant to explore the design, find where it is working and where it could be improved. If done well, design critiques allow everyone on the team to feel as if they have been heard and allow clients to give valuable feedback. In an agile environment, you will often have coders, project managers, product managers and people from other disciplines sitting in to give feedback, and you need to know how to quickly get them up to speed on the expectations if you want to get anywhere fast.
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Andy Budd is a firm believer in cross-functional pairing and thinks that some of the best usability solutions emanate from the tech team. However, at some point the experience needs to be owned, and it shouldn’t be owned by the last person to open the HTML file and “touch the truck”. If designers are happy for developers to “own the code”, why not show a similar amount of respect and let designers “own the experience”? After all, collaboration goes both ways. So if you don’t want designers to start “optimizing” your code on the live server, outside your version control processes, please stop doing the same to their design.
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When developers are expected to work in a corner until needed, that isolation from the design process prevents them from crafting the end product just as much as the designers themselves. The person who ultimately pays is the user. Whether you’re a developer, designer, or in another role, our mindsets need to change; we want to provide the best products for our users. Design decisions aren’t the sole responsibility of the design team. Decisions made during the design stages have far-reaching consequences that affect the entire project. A representative of each area, especially development and design, should be included when project-critical decisions are made.
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Leadership is not a dirty word. It’s not about ditching collaboration. It’s not about commandeering the room and shelling out mandates. Leadership is a natural, normal human craving. For a group to succeed — for design to succeed — someone has to establish a vision, a goal, a destination, and help the team get there — inspire the team to get there. In this article, Robert Hoekman Jr will look at how to run a kickoff and how to get yourself into a positive position in which you can steer the ship, rather than crash it into the dock.
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Lyndon Cerejo spoke with Amit Murumkar about his journey with Canvsly over the past three and a half years. Canvsly helps parents capture and store their children’s artwork for posterity. Amit independently funded the iOS app for two years until it became self-sustaining, and he experimented with different monetization strategies until settling on revenue-sharing from services. The conversation excerpts that follow highlight ten lessons for first-time app entrepreneurs, which I hope will be helpful for readers who are considering a similar journey.
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We often want information on what users and potential users of our designs think and how they behave in the context of where they will use our design. Intercepts allow you to engage users in a variety of settings to collect data to inform your design. In this article, Victor Yocco shares a method to design and carry out effective intercepts as part of your user research. You can use the steps and information provided in this article in your own process for intercepting users!
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Jay Kaufmann has written job listings for many organizations over the years and for all manner of user experience roles. When he wrote his first job description, he took other listings from his company as a base, looked around for some examples from other companies and ended up with what he sees in hindsight as being the usual run-of-the-mill hodgepodge of bullet points. Presented with this today, Jay would throw out more than half the content in order to focus on what’s relevant and unique. In this article, he’d like to share some tried and true techniques for advertising your UX opening.
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There is no such thing as a project that goes off well without some level of planning. You’re just not the one doing it. You can keep complaining, or you can change it. You’re a designer, which means you’re capable of imagining a better version of the world than the one you’re living in. And yet there you are, stuck at the back. In this article, Robert Hoekman Jr. will share some of the reasons it happens. And how to stop being an afterthought.
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The “learn to code” movement is gaining momentum among designers, but you’d be hard pressed to find a similarly strong movement for other disciplines within a team. Perhaps there should be. We should all be striving to learn, but… what exactly should we learn? Maybe it it’s about learning to communicate and collaborate, to respect the nuances of each other’s craft — and the artistry and reason that they both demand in equal measure — without attempting to master it for oneself.
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No matter your status or situation, whether director or loner, you are in a position to lead, to raise the bar in a place where it consistently sits lower than you think it should. As an in-house UX professional, Robert Hoekman Jr has formed and run UX teams for multiple companies. As a consultant, he has worked with dozens of clients on hundreds of projects. In this article, he will share what he learned about how to get what you want. Most of these things can be applied whether you’re inside of a company or consulting for one, whether you’re a fledgling designer or a veteran leader.
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