Strategy Articles & Videos

  • Design Thinking 102

    Get started with Design Thinking by practicing empathy in manageable, small yet effective, ways.

  • Will UX Ever Become Obsolete? (Jakob Nielsen)

    Research and design go hand in hand and have staying power. Even as UX principles become more widely accepted, there is always more to learn and improve.

  • 10 Things Executives Should Know About Intranets

    A good intranet increases productivity and can be an excellent motivational tool. Intranets are vital to an organization's success and requires executive support. Learn what management can do to support better intranets.

  • Using Prioritization Matrices to Inform UX Decisions

    Visuals such as charts and matrices can help practitioners base important decisions on objective, relevant criteria instead of subjective opinions.

  • When Making Design Tradeoffs, Don’t Forget Hidden Costs

    When making design decisions, analyze the alternatives to identify hidden costs before you get stuck paying for them.

  • 10 UX Challenges for the Next 25 Years (Jakob Nielsen Keynote)

    Jakob Nielsen presents his UX directions for the future: How UX roles will evolve, and how UX involvement can solve major challenges for the world. (This was the keynote at the UX Conference in Las Vegas.)

  • The 5 Steps to Service Blueprinting

    Five key steps comprise a framework for service blueprinting that can be scaled to any scope or timeline.

  • Marketing Email and Newsletters: UX Findings Then and Now

    New research finds big changes in newsletter design and in customers’ attitudes toward marketing email.

  • Translating UX Goals into Analytics Measurement Plans

    Focus on UX goals to drive analytics measurement plans, rather than tracking superficial metrics. Identify the core goal of a design to meaningfully measure it.

  • Seamlessness in the Omnichannel User Experience

    Companies must support painless transitions across channels in order to create a usable omnichannel experience.

  • Optimizing for Context in the Omnichannel User Experience

    Design for each channel’s unique strengths and role in the customer journey to create usable context-specific experiences.

  • UX Stories Communicate Designs

    Help internal audiences empathize with users and buy into your design goals with well-crafted stories that build insight and focus on users and their needs.

  • Journey Mapping in Real Life: A Survey of UX Practitioners

    Successful journey maps need to be focused on a clear business goal, well communicated in the organization, and truthful to user needs.

  • Minimize Design Risk by Focusing on Outcomes not Features

    Resist the urge to lead with implementation. Once you know what the need is, you’ll know what to build.

  • When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps

    Journey maps combine two powerful instruments—storytelling and visualization—in order to help teams understand and address customer needs.

  • Customer Journeys and Omnichannel User Experience

    Organizations must create omnichannel UX strategies that optimize the end-to-end user experience of completing a task across devices and interaction channels.

  • How UX Professionals Collaborate on Deliverables

    82% of UX professionals collaborate with other team members to produce deliverables. Ideation workshops and “four-eyes” reviews occur frequently, both in-person and remotely. In addition, the roles and contributions of collaborators vary widely.

  • Simplicity Wins over Abundance of Choice

    As the number of choices increases, so does the effort required to collect information and make good decisions. Featuritis can be an exhausting disease for users.

  • Content Migration Alone Is Not An Effective Content Strategy

    While fairly popular, “lift and shift” is not a viable content strategy. It is a folly fueled by fear, limited resources, inexperience, and politics. There are better ways to ensure high-quality intranet content, and two award-winning designers offer their insights, proving that a bright attitude makes all the difference.

  • Personas Make Users Memorable for Product Team Members

    When based on user research, personas support user-centered design throughout a project’s lifecycle by making characteristics of key user segments more salient.

  • 3 Types of Roadmaps

    Roadmaps cover future work and vision, but this can be done at different scopes, from everything related to the product to only the UX activities and priorities, possibly narrowed to a sub-specialty of UX.

  • UX Roadmaps in 6 Steps

    A roadmap documents upcoming and future priorities for your user experience. The process starts with gathering goals, proceeds through the creation and sharing of the UX roadmap, and never ends, since the last step is to update.

  • 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.

  • UX Roadmaps 101

    A roadmap is a strategic plan for future user-experience work and user problems to be solved immediately vs. next vs. in the far future.

  • 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.

  • The Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and User Experience

    Do AI products have good user experience? Only partly, and to get better, we need to focus AI more on human needs than on what's technically possible. But AI can also help UX professionals do their job better, which will improve usability more widely.

  • Product Redesigns: Incremental or Overhaul

    Redesigning a user interface can be done in many smaller incremental releases, or as one big complete redo. Big change is risky, but necessary in 3 cases.

  • UX Vision

    Create an aspirational view of the experience users will have with your product, service, or organization in the future. This isn't fluff, but will guide a unified design strategy. Here are 5 steps to creating a UX vision.

  • AI & Machine Learning Will Change UX Research & Design

    At the virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen was asked "How will AI and Machine Learning affect UX Research & Design?"

  • 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?

  • Can Market Research Teams and UX Research Teams Collaborate and Avoid Miscommunication?

    The total customer journey and user experience quality will benefit from considering market research and user research to be highly related, and to integrate the two, instead of keeping different kinds of research teams from collaborating.

  • How UX Changes in the Recession

    At the Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen answered audience questions on how UX changes with the downturn in the world economy and what new industries will benefit from UX.

  • Long-Term Changes in UX and in Adaptation of Innovations

    How has the field of user experience changed over the last 30 years, how will it continue to change, and what can we expect for the uptake of technology innovations?

  • The Changing Role of the Designer: Practical Human-Centered Design

    Human-centered design has 4 principles: understand the problem, the people, and the system, and do iterative design. But what if you don't have time to do all 4 steps?

  • Can UX be 100% Remote?

    Is it possible to do all user-experience work 100% remotely? At the first Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen answered this question in an audience Q&A session.

  • Risk of Copying Famous Companies' Designs

    If a website or company is big and famous, should you copy their design for your own site? Likely not, because good UX depends on context, and your situation could be quite different than a world-famous company's circumstances.

  • Where Will UX Be in 5 Years?

    We asked a group of UX professionals what they think will happen to the field over the next 5 years. Will design get better? Worse? (Nobody thought this.) Or something completely new?

  • Users Hate Change

    Any time you release a new user interface design, you'll get complaints. This doesn't mean that the new design is worse than the old design; it simply means that it's new, and users don't like to learn different ways of doing things. Tips for reducing change aversion (you can't avoid it completely).

  • Creating a UX Roadmap

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

  • Will People Be More Tech Savvy in 10 Years? (Jakob Nielsen)

    People naturally avoid studying computers. Don't expect people's technical skills to improve in the future.

  • Recognize Strategic Opportunities with Long-Tail Data

    Be a strategic thinker by recognizing opportunities at scale with seemingly small and insignificant data.

  • Four Factors in UX Maturity

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

  • UX-Roadmapping Workshops: Agenda + Activities

    Collaboratively create a UX roadmap in a workshop setting by guiding participants through activities that familiarize them with the project goals, context, and inputs and that identify key roadmap themes and priorities.

  • PM and UX Have Markedly Different Views of Their Job Responsibilities

    A survey of people in user experience and product management shows that these professionals disagree on who should be responsible for many key tasks, like doing discoveries and early design.

  • Stakeholder Analysis for UX Projects

    UX professionals often work hard to convince stakeholders to support UX research and design efforts. Recognizing who your key stakeholders are and how they impact your work is the first step to building fruitful stakeholder relationships.

  • Design Systems 101

    A design system is a set of standards to manage design at scale by reducing redundancy while creating a shared language and visual consistency across pages and channels.

  • UXers and Product Managers Both Say Others Intrude on Their Work

    A survey of 372 UX and PM professionals shows that duplicative work is frequent and generates confusion and inefficiency.

  • 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 Types of Roadmaps in UX and Product Design

    Roadmaps that include UX work can have 3 scopes: product, field, and specialty. Understanding these and their benefits can focus your process, effort, and goals.

  • Refine, Remodel, Rebuild: 3 Strategies for Experience Improvement

    To improve customer experience, solutions range from low to high investment and impact, based on budget, risk tolerance, readiness, and unmet needs.

  • 7 Steps to Benchmark Your Product’s UX

    Benchmark your UX by first determining appropriate metrics and a study methodology. Then track these metrics across different releases of your product by running studies that follow the same established methodology.

  • Three Myths About Calculating the ROI of UX

    Many teams overthink return-on-investment calculations for UX work. Treat these calculations as a way to estimate the strategic value of design.

  • UX Roadmaps: Definition and Components

    A UX roadmap is a high-level, living artifact that prioritizes and communicates a UX team’s future work and problems to solve.

  • User Experience vs. Customer Experience: What’s The Difference?

    Customer experience (CX) is a term commonly used to define UX over long periods of time.

  • Journey Mapping: 9 Frequently Asked Questions

    Journey maps are useful for building common ground in an organization, but practitioners often have questions and misunderstandings about their scope and how to create them.

  • Using Prioritization Matrices to Inform UX Decisions

    Visuals such as charts and matrices can help practitioners base important decisions on objective, relevant criteria instead of subjective opinions.

  • The 5 Steps to Service Blueprinting

    Five key steps comprise a framework for service blueprinting that can be scaled to any scope or timeline.

  • Marketing Email and Newsletters: UX Findings Then and Now

    New research finds big changes in newsletter design and in customers’ attitudes toward marketing email.

  • Translating UX Goals into Analytics Measurement Plans

    Focus on UX goals to drive analytics measurement plans, rather than tracking superficial metrics. Identify the core goal of a design to meaningfully measure it.

  • Seamlessness in the Omnichannel User Experience

    Companies must support painless transitions across channels in order to create a usable omnichannel experience.