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Articles

Kate Kaplan

Kate Kaplan is Insights Architect at Nielsen Norman Group. She specializes in the application of human-centered design and research practices to enterprise UX challenges.

Prior to joining NN/g, Kate was VP of Strategy at the digital marketing agency Centerline Digital, where she led a cross-disciplinary team of UX designers, content strategists and digital marketers in solving complex problems for high-technology B2B organizations, such as IBM, GE and National Instruments.

@katewkaplan

Articles and Videos

  • 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.

  • Designing Complex Applications: A Framework

    5 different sources of UX complexity help explain and analyze the special design issues in complex applications.

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

    How do you decide whether to have a meeting or a workshop for a given problem or stage of your UX design process? Both involve a group of people, but there are 5 big differences, and the two formats work for different situations.

  • 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?

  • How to Handle Dominating Participants in UX Workshops: 3 Tactics

    Facilitators can use 3 ascending levels of intervention tactics to maintain positive momentum in groups with participants who monopolize activities and limit diversity of perspectives.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 8 Design Guidelines for Complex Applications

    Despite great diversity in the workflows and end users supported by complex applications, these 8 design guidelines are generally applicable.

  • Myths About Complex App Users

    Three stereotypes explain much resistance to improving the usability of complex applications for domain-specific tasks: that people like the old ways, that they are experts in the existing UI, and that training will make up for bad design. All are misleading.