Category Archives: Introduction

Some new projects

After a long hiatus, I’m jumping back into the world of content creation. Not only will I be creating more posts for this blog based on my current companies evolution with UX, Agile, & kanban, but I have started a few other initiatives that I wanted to highlight.

Lunch with TED
Lunch with TED is a simple and free way to bring inspiration, perspective, creative thinking, and community to your workplace with very little effort and no money. Simply reserve a room, invite colleagues, and screen a TED talk. I started running them almost two years ago at my last company and have continued at my current company. They are so popular that I decided to share the idea in the hope that others find it useful.

Open Personas Project
A number of years ago, Steve Mulder, author of The User is Always Right, and I came up with the idea for an open source repository of personas. People who had created personas could share them with the broader community, and those who needed a starting point could use personas that had already been vetted to some degree. We can’t do this on our own and are recruiting a team of volunteers to help make it a reality.

FUXT.it
The design community has made so much progress in the past few years. With the success of everything from the iPhone to the Nest, businesses are realizing that good design sells. Sadly, there are still a lot of experiences that are not just bad, they are FUXT. You can help end these travesties by calling them out and publicly shaming them on FUXT.it. Don’t let bad design go unpunished.

Welcome

There are a lot of blogs out there. Why start another one? Same reasons as everyone else. Hopefully, I can share some experiences and ideas and start some conversations that might be helpful to others.

Who is this blog written for?
Anyone working on improving the user experience of web sites or software, including experience designers, IAs, usability practitioners and those whom we work with.

What’s the issue?
As I talk to colleagues, there is a lot of frustration. Things aren’t as easy as they should be. There are a lot of talented people who are not able to do their best work.

It seems to me that process can help. That doesn’t mean you should all follow my process. Heck, I don’t really have a process. I believe in creating the right process to fit the situation at hand. For some, that means adding some rigor and focus to a chaotic process, and for others, it means adding some flexibility and streamlining an overly restrictive process. Don’t expect to get it right. Expect to constantly change. As a radar expert told me once, a missile doesn’t fly in a straight line. It constantly veers off course and then corrects itself, typically overcompensating, and then adjusting again.

I also don’t want to limit the conversation to just the design process, but everything around it as well. How do you lead a team of designers? How do you prove the value of what you do? I’m open.

I’ll also talk about how to work within an agile/iterative process. This is an experiment with my current start-up. I’ll post what works and what doesn’t.

Are there any topics you’d like to see covered? Leave them in comments.