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UX Teams Articles & Videos

  • Product & UX Partnerships

    Product management and user experience should partner throughout product development. But how? Here are 5 tips.

  • Design Thinking Learner's Journey

    Research with people who are learning Design Thinking shows that they progress in a nonlinear manner through 4 phases of increasing competency and confidence. Understanding these phases helps both learners and educators/managers.

  • Accounting for User Research in Agile

    Along with design and development work, research efforts need to be represented in an Agile backlog to enable teams to focus on continuously learning about users throughout the project.

  • First Online UX Internship

    Our UX intern, Ambika Tripathi, gives advice on how to succeed when interning in an all-remote UX team.

  • Separate UX Backlogs in Agile

    Agile development teams that struggle to keep track of UX work in the product backlog can utilize a separate backlog for UX. This method can help siloed teams where UX and development aren't in direct communication. Separate UX backlogs do have pros and cons, which are discussed here.

  • UX-Maturity Stage 1: Absent

    A company at this stage is either oblivious to UX or believes it doesn't apply to what it does.

  • Four Factors in UX Maturity

    Improving UX maturity requires growth and evolution across 4 high-level factors: strategy, culture, process, and outcomes.

  • UX Team Structure and Reporting

    UX staff can be organized in two ways: centralized or decentralized (or a hybrid). The teams can also report into different parts of the bigger organization. There is currently no single best practice for these team-structure questions.

  • Derailed Design Critiques: Tactics for Getting Back on Track

    Feedback during design critiques can be filled with hypothetical scenarios and unactionable suggestions. The right facilitation techniques help stakeholders and team members stay on track while still feeling heard.

  • UX Team Staff Size Relative to Development Staff

    We investigated current trends in design-team ratios, specifically: What's the typical number of designers and researchers in an organization relative to the number of developers?

  • First Diverge, Then Converge During UX Workshops

    A general technique that's helpful in many kinds of UX workshops and design ideation is to first have team members work independently to create diverging ideas and solutions. Then, as a separate step, everybody works together to converge on the final outcome.

  • Design Thinking: The Learner’s Journey

    As an individual learns design thinking, they go through 4 learning phases: newcomer, adopter, leader, and grandmaster.

  • The State of Design Teams: Structure, Alignment, and Impact

    A survey of 557 UX and design professionals reveals themes in the structure, size, alignment, and impact of design teams.

  • The 6 Steps to Roadmapping

    To create a roadmap, inputs are gathered and clustered into themes, then prioritized and visualized. This article covers 6 key steps to roadmapping that can be applied to any scope or industry.

  • 3 Steps for Getting Started with DesignOps

    Treat your goal to implement DesignOps like a design problem: Collect evidence that demonstrates where the true design-team challenges lie and align DesignOps efforts accordingly.

  • Typical Designer–to–Developer and Researcher–to–Designer Ratios

    In 2020, the most typical researcher–to–designer–to–developer ratio reported was 1:5:50. Beware, however, of using role ratios alone to measure teams’ maturity or impact.

  • How Can UX Professionals Balance a Range of Skills as They Build Their Careers

    Advice on how to balance breadth and depth of skill within the many different subdisciplines of the user experience profession. You can't be great at everything, so how do you choose where to specialize in your UX career?

  • Skill Mapping: A Digital Template for Remote Teams

    A collaborative spreadsheet is an efficient tool for evaluating skills of UX team members and creating an overall team shape.

  • Can People with Established Careers in Another Field Become UX Professionals?

    Will the UX field value people who change careers from another field and want to become user experience professionals? Will the field still value them if they're a bit older, and how do they compete with fresh graduates?

  • The UX Maturity Model

    Is the UX Maturity model from 15 years ago still valid, and can companies stay at the highest level, the user-centered corporation?

  • UX Workshop Energizers and Icebreakers

    3 quick game-like activities you can use with participants in a UX workshop to get the team energized and ready to be creative and productive before turning to the real work of the meeting.

  • Kickoff Meetings for Team Alignment Before Starting UX Projects

    Design and development projects are highly multidisciplinary with team members with a variety of skills and vocabulary use, sometimes with conflicting definitions of terms. A kickoff meeting can make sure everybody is on the proverbial same page regarding all the team members' skills and responsibilities.

  • Transitioning from UI to UX

    Anybody who's already a good UI designer and can make great screens, has a big head start to becoming a good UX designer, but more is required to excel in this expanded role.

  • The "Parking Lot" in UX Workshops: Friend or Foe?

    To maintain focus in a UX workshop, set aside ideas in a "parking lot" if they diverge from the stated agenda. Parked ideas should be discussed later when they won't slow the team's momentum in addressing the meeting's main topic. Here are 3 guidelines for making the most of a parking lot.

  • How to Create a UX Workshop Agenda

    UX workshops can drive projects forward and build consensus, but are only a valuable use of time when the agenda is defined from the goals you want to achieve. Here's a 3-step process for designing a useful workshop agenda in UX projects.

  • Affinity Diagramming: Collaborate, Sort and Prioritize UX Ideas

    Use the affinity diagramming method with stakeholders and members to efficiently categorize then prioritize UX ideas, research findings, and any other rich topics. Work together to quickly develop a shared understanding among your team.

  • UX vs. Service Design

    What's the difference between user experience and service design? Or, more to the point, how does good service design support a good user experience?

  • 5 Signs to Diagnose Low UX Maturity in Your Organization

    How can you determine whether your organization is doing UX right? One tool is to estimate the UX maturity: high (set up for systematic success) or low maturity (mostly fail, and ship bad design, unless you're lucky). This video presents the main signs of low UX maturity.

  • Using Trade-Off Scales for Prioritization in UX Design Projects

    Trade-off scales are a tool that UX practitioners can use to visually prioritize user needs and project dimensions to focus resources on the most important ones.

  • Too Much UX Success

    What to do when a UX team becomes too popular and too many projects want UX help with their designs, overwhelming the available capacity to do good work.

  • Top 5 Mistakes in Running UX Workshops

    Workshops are a useful tool in the user-experience design process, but mistakes are common when the workshop facilitator didn't prepare right, causing the team to waste time.

  • UX Is Not Arts & Crafts: Why We Use Tangibles

    Flip-charts, post-its, markers, stickers, and even fake coins are common ingredients in a UX toolkit. Though they may appear to be frivolous art supplies, these materials serve a crucial role in supporting team engagement, creativity, and focus.

  • Creating a UX Roadmap

    An effective UX roadmap can help teams maintain strategic direction, align with stakeholders, and prioritize ideas to respond to requests.

  • Where Should UX Report: Centralized, Product, or Somewhere else?

    There are clear benefits and drawbacks to doing UX work as part of a UX team or a product team. Knowing and addressing these can help you grow the organization’s UX maturity, improve awareness about UX, and hone your craft.

  • Ideation Techniques for a One-Person UX Team

    Even a lone UX wolf can ideate design options, and structured ideation techniques help you explore the design space.

  • Clarifying the UX Role for Your Team

    Tips to help clarify the role of UX and how to navigate the relationship dynamics between UX and the rest of the team within an Agile development process.

  • Coping with Being the One-Person UX Team

    How to maximize your impact when you are the sole UX specialist on your project or in your organization.

  • Handle Bad UX Requests Without Saying No

    UX professionals often receive poorly defined design requests. When saying no is not an option, a more productive way of addressing the request is to focus on the outcome goals and the Return On Investment (ROI) of proper UX effort.

  • Accounting for User Research in Agile

    Along with design and development work, research efforts need to be represented in an Agile backlog to enable teams to focus on continuously learning about users throughout the project.

  • UX-Maturity Stage 1: Absent

    A company at this stage is either oblivious to UX or believes it doesn't apply to what it does.

  • Four Factors in UX Maturity

    Improving UX maturity requires growth and evolution across 4 high-level factors: strategy, culture, process, and outcomes.

  • Derailed Design Critiques: Tactics for Getting Back on Track

    Feedback during design critiques can be filled with hypothetical scenarios and unactionable suggestions. The right facilitation techniques help stakeholders and team members stay on track while still feeling heard.

  • Design Thinking: The Learner’s Journey

    As an individual learns design thinking, they go through 4 learning phases: newcomer, adopter, leader, and grandmaster.

  • The State of Design Teams: Structure, Alignment, and Impact

    A survey of 557 UX and design professionals reveals themes in the structure, size, alignment, and impact of design teams.

  • The 6 Steps to Roadmapping

    To create a roadmap, inputs are gathered and clustered into themes, then prioritized and visualized. This article covers 6 key steps to roadmapping that can be applied to any scope or industry.

  • 3 Steps for Getting Started with DesignOps

    Treat your goal to implement DesignOps like a design problem: Collect evidence that demonstrates where the true design-team challenges lie and align DesignOps efforts accordingly.

  • Typical Designer–to–Developer and Researcher–to–Designer Ratios

    In 2020, the most typical researcher–to–designer–to–developer ratio reported was 1:5:50. Beware, however, of using role ratios alone to measure teams’ maturity or impact.

  • Skill Mapping: A Digital Template for Remote Teams

    A collaborative spreadsheet is an efficient tool for evaluating skills of UX team members and creating an overall team shape.

  • Crafting Product-Specific Design Principles to Support Better Decision Making

    Product design principles (or, in short, design principles) are value statements that frame design decisions and support consistency in decision making across teams working on the same product or service.

  • Service Blueprinting: A Digital Template for Remote Teams

    The structure and format of a collaborative spreadsheet makes it an effective tool for virtual service blueprinting.

  • DesignOps Maturity: Low in Most Organizations

    In a survey of 557 design and UX practitioners, organizations only did 22% of recommended DesignOps efforts, did not have DesignOps-dedicated roles, and had low DesignOps maturity overall.

  • DesignOps: What's the Point? How Practitioners Define DesignOps Value

    Practitioners define DesignOps based on the value it provides for their team or organization. Most practitioners think of DesignOps as a way to standardize and optimize processes, enable and support designers, or scale design.

  • Applying UX-Workshop Techniques to the Hiring Process

    Create an effective hiring process by borrowing techniques used in UX workshops.

  • Workshop Facilitation 101

    By following a set of simple facilitation principles and using standard tools and activities, anybody can grow into a confident workshop facilitator.

  • Remote UX Work: Guidelines and Resources

    Even though in-person UX sessions are typically ideal, sometimes budget or travel restrictions necessitate remote UX work. This article presents guidelines for remote user research, UX workshops or presentations, and collaboration.

  • UX Workshops vs. Meetings: What's the Difference?

    Meetings are for sharing information; workshops are for solving a problem or reaching an actionable goal. We compare the differences in purpose, scope, length, structure, and preparation time for workshops and meetings.

  • Incorporating UX Work into Your Agile Backlog

    Three different backlog models enable teams to keep track of UX work in their Agile processes. Each model comes with pros and cons.

  • Where Should UX Report? 3 Common Models for UX Teams and How to Choose Among Them

    Design and user research usually report to either a centralized UX team, a product team, or a hybrid of these. There are clear benefits and drawbacks to each model.