Jobs-to-be-done focus on user problems and needs, while well-executed personas include the same information and also add behavioral and attitudinal details.
Service design improves the experiences of both the user and employee by designing, aligning, and optimizing an organization’s operations to better support customer journeys.
Design studios are UX workshops that combine ideation and design critique with idea prioritization and help teams collaborate and feel invested in the project.
Test your infographics, reports, and UX deliverables with representative colleagues to refine them and prevent potential stakeholder misunderstandings.
Improve your UI design solutions by considering many ideas before settling on any one of them. A solid ideation methodology broadens your idea-generation capacity.
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.
Not only does design thinking foster innovation, but it also strengthens teams by creating common vocabulary and artifacts, and a trust-based team culture.
What is design thinking and why should you care? History and background plus a quick overview and visualization of 6 phases of the design thinking process. Approaching problem solving with a hands-on, user-centric mindset leads to innovation, and innovation can lead to differentiation and a competitive advantage.
Mapping can help UX practitioners synthesize insight into one place and visualize the problem space. This video covers 3 maps that are often utilized during the discovery phase of a UX design project: ecosystem maps, experience maps, and process maps.
Our research with UX practitioners found 3 main areas of frustrations with service-blueprint projects. Here are recommendations for overcoming or alleviating these problems.
In a museum, knowing the backstory of an artifact makes it more interesting. Similarly, in a UX project, you can make better decisions when you know the context of your UX artifacts like journey maps and wireframes.
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.
What does it mean to be a "designer?" Let's broaden the definition, based on the purpose, not the discipline. (Keynote by our Chief Designer, Sarah Gibbons)
Edgar Anzaldua presents a 6-year case study of learning and applying ever-more subtle UX concepts and growing his influence. Always something new to learn, from junior to senior professional level.
Teams who don't know much about UX, often ask you "so when will you give us the design?" during the early design-thinking stages. Areej Aljarba used design thinking itself to overcome this misconception. (Video from 'Back in the Real World' panel with past UX Conference participants.)
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.
An 8-step process for UX designers and researchers to collaborate better with their stakeholders, for increased collaboration, to help stakeholders meet their goals, and to ensure the impact of your work.
Advance planning and having thought through alternatives can save you when facilitating a UX workshop and the unexpected happens (as it always does). Jan Haaland shares his experience during a panel with past participants in the UX Conference.
At the core of all the myriad of exercises and activity types in UX workshops are a simpler set of 7 foundational activities that can be blended to achieve the desired result.
With experience, UX teams have evolved techniques for better collaboration and design practices to involve and engage remote and distributed team members. With participants at the Virtual UX Conference.
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.
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.
A clear vision gives the team something to aim for, and this is especially important for intranet projects, which often involve contributors from many different departments or functions.
In UX design, you always have to prioritize. Features, personas, usability problems, and the list goes on. Dot votes are a simple way to find the group sense of what's the most important.
The facilitator of a UX workshop, meeting, or other team activity anywhere in the design process has the job of enhancing the group's performance by optimizing the process through structure, activity, and guidance.
To launch a new design operations practice in a company, prioritize and aim for manageable and achievable first steps. Preferably measurable ones that can prove value and form the basis for subsequent steps.
Unsure how to get started using UX mapping methods? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn how to visualize UX insights and ideas into mapped visualizations.
In the discovery phase of a UX project, a problem statement is used to identify and frame the problem to be explored and solved, as well as to communicate the discovery’s scope and focus.
Even people with limited drawing abilities can learn to sketch a wireframe if they learn a few common conventions used to represent various design elements.
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.
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.
Pain points are problems that occur at the different levels of the customer experience: interaction level, customer-journey level, or relationship level.
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.
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.
We made the 10 heuristics’ posters easy to read and understand by iterating through multiple versions and improving each based on user-centered principles and methods.
Set yourself up for journey-mapping success by educating yourself on the basics, defining objectives, building a crossfunctional team, collaborating on the map, and optimizing your presentation.
Communication is the top challenge when designing remotely, according to 213 UX professionals. Receiving feedback, replicating informal conversations, and maintaining a clear direction on projects were the biggest communication concerns.
