UX Teams Articles & Videos

  • Portfolios for UX Researchers: Top 10 Recommendations

    A portfolio of past projects can advance the career of a UX researcher. Present the right work, summarize your findings, and communicate clearly to showcase your skills.

  • 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.

  • UX Debt: How to Identify, Prioritize, and Resolve

    Like tech debt, UX debt piles up over time and, if left unaddressed, leads to compounding user problems and costly cleanup efforts. Agile teams can modify their processes to track and resolve UX debt.

  • 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.

  • A Model for Conducting UX Workshops and Exercises

    To ensure activity participants get the most out of UX activities, use a three-step process to conduct them: explain, execute, and examine.

  • 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.

  • In Defense of Post-its

    Sticky notes strengthen team dynamics and represent an egalitarian, concise means for expressing ideas in UX design projects.

  • Affinity Diagramming for Collaboratively Sorting UX Findings and Design Ideas

    Affinity diagramming has long been used in business to organize large sets of ideas into clusters. In UX, the method is used to organize research findings or to sort design ideas in ideation workshops.

  • The 5 Steps to Service Blueprinting

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

  • 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.

  • Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking

    Visualizing user attitudes and behaviors in an empathy map helps UX teams align on a deep understanding of end users. The mapping process also reveals any holes in existing user data.

  • How to Deal With Bad Design Suggestions

    Gracefully respond to unsolicited design ideas, and prevent them from derailing good design. Turn them into UX learning experiences.

  • Ideation in Practice: How Effective UX Teams Generate Ideas

    Data from 257 UX professionals shows that quality UX ideas come from ideating early in the design cycle, drawing inspiration from user research, and working with a group. Many struggle with generating ideas because they lack time, managerial support, and a methodology for conducting effective ideation sessions.

  • 5 Strategies for Presenting UX Remotely

    Master remote presentations by creating the right environment, being human, reducing distractions, taking control, and telling a story.

  • Don’t “Validate” Designs; Test Them

    The phrase “validate the design” discourages teams from finding and following up on UX issues in user testing. UX research must drive design change, not just pat designers on the back.

  • Troubleshooting Group Ideation: 10 Fixes for More and Better UX Ideas

    Groups can bias individuals and impact collaborative ideation. A focus on getting as many ideas as possible can mitigate some of the negative group effects.

  • Group Notetaking for User Research

    Teams can use digital chronological logs or affinity diagrams to capture notes, and then aggregate these notes into top findings with the whiteboard method.

  • Poor Management = Mediocre UX Design

    Weak management support for UX and lack of UX leadership and role models correlate with unexceptional designs, according to data from 360 companies.

  • 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.

  • 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 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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?

  • Remote Work and Play: The Most Important UX Challenge

    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.

  • Is There Value in Having Others than the Designers Work on UX?

    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?

  • UX Portfolios: Preparing for Interviews

    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.

  • How to Grow a UX Career and Advance Your User-Experience Expertise

    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.

  • Design Principles 101

    Design principles are value statements that guide designers in making the right tradeoff-type decisions in UX design contexts.

  • What Makes a Virtual Conference Work?

    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?

  • Tools for Running Remote UX Workshops

    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.

  • What Makes an Effective UX Leader?

    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.

  • Retrospectives 102: The Sailboat Method

    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.

  • Communicating UX to Your Colleagues and Organization

    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.

  • 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.