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.
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.
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.
A parking lot captures unrelated questions or out-of-scope conversation during UX meetings or workshops in order to keep the discussion focused and maintain momentum.
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.
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.
Asynchronous remote ideation allows people to contribute ideas whenever it’s convenient to do so, but synchronous sessions lead to faster results and more team building.
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.
By placing colored dots, participants in UX workshops, activities, or collaborative sessions individually vote on the importance of design ideas, features, usability findings, and anything else that requires prioritization.
Remote UX work is challenging, but using digital collaboration and communication tools can mitigate some of its difficulties. Our recommendations are based on NN/g’s experience as a remote company.
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.
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.
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.
As part of an Agile team, UX professionals should participate in all Scrum ceremonies in order to maintain open communication, influence product success, and productively contribute to the team.
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.
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.
User need statements, also called problem statements or point-of-view statements, are a powerful, fundamental tool for defining and aligning on the problem you are going to solve.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
At the virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen was asked "What's the most interesting UX topic at the moment?" Answer: better support for remote lifestyles.
Some designers feel that they know everything about UX, including how to do research, so is there any value in having others contribute, whether dedicated user researchers or external consultants?
Your portfolio must play two roles when you apply for a UX job: first persuade the hiring manager to bring you in for an interview (or even a first screening call) and then support you during the interview itself.
At the Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen answered audience questions on how to advance through various career stages: before getting your first job, and being successful as you grow your user experience skills and expertise.
Most online events are boring and people tune out, and yet the Virtual UX Conference was a success with strong audience engagement and high feedback scores. Why?
How to maximize team participation and the value of the outcome when running a UX workshop remotely. Different platforms have different benefits and downsides, so choose depending on your circumstances and needs.
We asked a group of user experience professionals what makes for efficient UX leadership in their experience. Answers differed, but included a lot of soft skills.
After each sprint, the team should have a retrospective session to identify what went well or not so well. The sailboat metaphor is a nice way to structure such retrospectives.
When the organization and your coworkers don't understand UX, we have to apply our own methods to communicate more clearly with the target audience for our work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
