While building a strong customer culture takes a multi-prong approach, workshops are fun and easy — perfect for jumpstarting a sluggish culture and giving participants the thinking tools necessary to filter decisions through the customer lens. In this article, Claire Mason has documented the process around four types of workshops that you can use to drive customer-centricity in your own companies. The workshops are divided into two categories: “general” and “project-specific”. General refers to workshops that are designed for anyone to participate. Project-specific workshops are best run with a particular, actionable outcome in mind.
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The web is wonderfully diverse and unpredictable because of wonderfully diverse people shaping it. In this new series of short interviews, we talk to interesting people doing interesting work in our industry and sharing what they’ve learned. Today, Vitaly Friedman talks to Brad Frost, author of the book Atomic Design that introduces a methodology to create and maintain effective design systems.
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Developers are known to usually be the last ones who leave their fingerprints before a website or any sort of web product gets shipped. Obviously, a lot of responsibility is involved and the quality of their work can either make a project excel or go down the drain. In this article, Stefan Kaltenegger gives suggestions about what frontend developers can do on their end to better bridge the gap between designers and developers.
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Design involves decisions, and those decisions are often flawed because our brains are wired for survival. The same brain features that literally helped us survive in the wild do not serve us well in the 21st-century workplace. In this article, Eric Olive will identify four decision-related traps that impede good design and offer techniques for avoiding these traps. These decision traps are based on research conducted by psychologists, neuroscientists, molecular biologists, and behavioral economists including several cited here.
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Whether you’re a designer or developer, it can be challenging to stay current in this fast-paced world where it feels like new tools are Product Hunted on a weekly basis. If you’re working in a larger team, and especially if you’re working in an enterprise or b2b (business-to-business) context, being able to make even small improvements in efficiency can lead to huge increases in the effectiveness of your design organization. In this article Paul Hanaoka will show you how large teams can benefit from using more open, collaborative tooling and how to make adoption and migration feasible and pleasant.
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Brainstorming seems to be just a fancy name for a usual discussion, but when organized right, it becomes a source of innovation. In this article, Slava Shestopalov brings you a step-by-step guide with tips and tricks, examples of slides, and preparation checklists. Brainstorming has a bright side: It’s a civilized process of generating ideas together. At least this is how it appears in the books on creativity. So, can we make it real? After reaching the end of this article, we hope that you’ll be able to organize brainstorming sessions with your colleagues and clients, and co-create something valuable.
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As a web designer, you might think that what you get paid to build websites doesn’t matter so long as you have money in the bank. But it does. If you want to remain competitive within the space, make sure to charge within one of the estimated ranges mentioned in this article — at least, to start. Then, as your business grows, you can steadily raise your prices in line with the increasing value of the websites you build. With this guide, Suzanne Scacca breaks down three ways you can charge for your design services and help you find the perfect rate to charge clients in 2019.
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The state of commercial web conferences is utterly broken. Setting up a conference isn’t an easy undertaking. It takes time and attention to all the little details that make up a truly memorable experience. It’s not something one can take lightly, and it’s often a major personal and financial commitment. But what lurks behind the scenes of such events is a widely spread, toxic culture despite the hefty ticket price. And more often than not, speakers bear the burden of all of their conference-related expenses, flights, and accommodation from their own pockets. This isn’t right, and it shouldn’t be acceptable in our industry.
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Whenever project managers try to manage their team using spreadsheets alone, they usually face some problems. Reporting and documenting with spreadsheets can become quite a time-consuming task. Today, Nick Babich will like to introduce Float, an app that makes it so much easier for product managers to keep a good overview on the tasks of the entire team and everyone involved. Float makes it easy to see everything you need to know about your team’s projects in a single place, giving project managers the information and functionality they need to handle the fast-paced world of digital design and development. Let’s get started!
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A roundup of Advent Calendar sites of interest to web designers and developers. From accessibility to UX, coding challenges to Perl, there really is something for everyone this December. Today, Rachel Andrew brings you calendars which are true community efforts, often with the bulk of the work falling to an individual or tiny team, with no budget to pay authors and editors. So, please join us in supporting these efforts, share the articles that you enjoyed reading, and join the discussions respectfully. Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, you can certainly learn a lot of new things over the next 24 days.
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