Articles

Rachel Krause

Rachel Krause is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Her areas of expertise include storytelling, UX in agile, design thinking, scaling design, and UX leadership. She has also planned and conducted research on careers, UX maturity, and intranets for clients and practitioners in numerous industries.

@rachelkrau

Articles and Videos

  • 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.

  • Design Thinking and Agile

    The design thinking project life-cycle has 6 well-defined stages. Mapping these stages onto a typical Agile development project shows when designers should conduct which UX activities.

  • 5 Steps to Creating a UX-Design Portfolio

    A portfolio highlighting your design process and past work shows others who you are as a designer. The process of creating a UX-design portfolio allows you to reflect on your skills and achievements.

  • Pencils vs. Pixels for UI Protyping and Sketching

    UX designers answer the question of when they prefer to use hand-drawn sketches of a user interface design vs. pixel-perfect designs generated on a computer.

  • How to Sketch a UI for Non-Designers

    "I can't draw," is a common phrase heard in ideation. But ideation happens in early stages of design and is meant to be messy. This video shows how to use basic shapes to convey UI elements.

  • Paper Prototyping 101

    Using paper prototypes is a great way to test a design idea and get usability feedback quickly. You can test whether a layout makes sense to users and make immediate changes if they run into issues.

  • 6 Rules for Persuasive Storytelling

    Stories build empathy and make the user needs and pain points memorable to your team. Effective stories speak the language of the audience, are rooted in data, and take advantage of compelling artifacts.

  • How to Run a Retrospective for a Design Team

    Retrospectives are a dedicated time to come together, reflect, and collaboratively improve your design team’s process. In this video, we'll walk through the four components of a retrospective and how to use this meeting effectively.

  • UX Retrospectives 101

    Retrospectives allow design teams to reflect on their work process and discuss what went well and what needs to be improved. These learnings can be translated into an action plan for future work.

  • How to Report Errors in Forms: 10 Design Guidelines

    Help users recover from errors by clearly identifying the problems and allowing users to access and correct erroneous fields easily.