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