e46 Personas are meant to be used, not just created
Personas are a widely used method, as they are seemingly easy to create and fit well into the image of a standardized design process. But as with any other t...
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AI tools’ near future
The doom and gloom around non-designers using AI tools to replace designers is increasing. I don’t doubt this is a trend, but I suspect that it won’t lead to...
Research both known unknowns and unknown unknows
Greg Bernstein in Making research more durable:
Design with restraint
Christopher K Wong in Why you shouldn’t be too eager to share your work:
Designing towards hurdles
A key idea in product design is to make things easier and simpler as much as possible so people are faster at whatever they are doing, with the assumption th...
Generative AI’s automation trap
A constant thing with creating new software seems the tendency to automate things people can do easily while leaving the more complicated stuff for people to...
Switching from Evernote to Joplin
I’ve been an Evernote user for more than 10 years, but finally decided to switch away from it. I started to use Joplin, an open-source note-taking app a coup...
UX & PM: A Strategic Duo part 2
This is the second post in a series that Greg and I are publishing on the strategic role of UX in product development and how PMs and UX professionals can de...
Anatomy of a UX strategy
Senior designers and even design leaders are often asked to go more strategic. Makes sense, that’s what more experienced people do to increase their impact a...
Yet another post on designer job titles
Digital design is still in its storming phase, that’s why we have so many posts, debates, and comments on naming, terminology, etc. Part of it is philosophic...
Newsletter on Design Leadership
I’m starting a (bi)weekly newsletter on design leadership called 9am26. Looking around the interwebs these days there are more and more good articles on lead...
UX Coffee Hours FAQ
I’ve been part of the UX Coffee Hours for the past 1.5 years, meeting UX researchers every week for a chat, mostly mentoring people starting out in their car...
My knowledge workflow 2021
This is my current knowledge workflow as of beginning of 2021. I write these both to document my current practice, and also to clearly set what guidelines I’...
Personas are for aggregation or for alignment
Had a chat with a researcher this week, and one of the topics we discussed was how to use personas in a design process. We ended up talking a lot on why thei...
Design is business
Was on a meetup today, and one of the questions asked from the presenter was “What’s the relationship between business and design at your company”. Ofcourse ...
#stretchcon 2020 impressions
Last week I attended the Strech conference 2020 online. I found over the years that the individual talks themselves don’t give that much useful insights, but...
Designing the Growth Path for UX Leaders and UX Managers
My notes from Jared Spool’s talk “Designing the Growth Path for UX Leaders and UX Managers”.
Plan to learn — on well designed research plans
Well designed research plans in qualitative user research help to successfully learn about users
Designing AI products
This story is based on the talk I recently gave on the UX Budapest Meetup featuring AI topics. Here is my prezi from the event. I’ve added more links and mor...
Making sure your UX home assignment hits the mark
We assess UX designers’ and researchers’ professional skills with a homework during our hiring process. While we set up our interviews to get a nice picture ...
Tipping is sexy
Showing tip amount examples guides how much tip people give
The 4x4 Mini-Design Brief
A quick method to build a creative brief for small projects
Why Doing Design Research is Imperative
I was teaching designers this week, and it struck me: people don’t question the need of doing research any more. There used to be a few confident, experience...
UX Quotes to the Rescue
I seem to followed by quotes on all things UX. They appear in presentations, on Facebook conversations as funny come backs, in discussions about UIs. I get i...
Designing for Mobile Engagement
Enhancing apps with messaging
Design Camp Adventures
Things learned at the IxD ’16 Camp
Drawing Houses
User Story Mapping at Emarsys
Clashing Design Principles to Annoy You
From time to time I find myself obsessed with broken things, especially physical objects. The ones that leave me in an interrupted, annoyed, confused state w...
How Might We — Hogyan tudhatnánk
(This post is about how to apply the How Might We method in Hungarian, and in a broader sense how language based design methods translate.)
From design to product design
This week I attended a UX Budapest meetup event. Besides the always great networking I liked the talks too, as they offered an interesting insight on how peo...
#watchlearn Designing How We Design — Kim Goodwin
#watchlearn is series of sessions of the Emarsys UX team watching a talk, discussing it, and publishing their notes about it.
About Ford’s faster horses
There is an often told quote attributed to Henry Ford, in product development:
#stretchcon 2015 impressions
I frequently see UX people in a leadership role, even if they are not team leads or managers. They still need to guide their teams or even to change processe...
Garden
Design critique - classifying insights
On design critiques all feedback might be treated as equal, but that’s of course not the case, some points are more important. When doing round-robin, feedba...
Discovery differs from delivery
Discovery and delivery are not just different phases in the product design process, they also differ from each other in significant ways in terms of what the...
Design innovation
There are multiple types of innovation, technology is one of these, another one is design. Design innovation can relate to many areas of a product, even up t...
Staff designers
A few notes from the Staff design, interviews with high level individual contributor designers by Brian Lovin.
UX strategy
Two chief direction for UX strategy (correlates with the two roles for design leaders, leadership and management):
Opportunity solution trees
Theresa Torres describes Opportunity solution trees as a visual way to think about working towards an outcome throughout a discovery process.
Hypothesis
Tal Raviv’s article, That’s Not a Hypothesis describes what hypothesis is in the scientific method: something we believe in, a part of the model what we beli...
Strategic vs tactical research
User research projects vary in scope, where they are on the scale depends on the goal.
Experience stories
Collecting pieces
Setting design OKRs
OKRs (for example from Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke is a good book about it) or similar goal setting techniques usually work well for focusing product t...
Design leader activities
Two useful frameworks for design leaders to describe their activities:
First three months
To get started as a design leader at a new role a few things to look out for.
Types of vision
I found the term vision a bit confusing when thinking on their role on product development. Possibly since different people understand different things when ...
Garden
Garden seems to be an emerging trend in thinking, doing knowledge work. It’s an approach that is described by multiple methodologies or frameworks and all of...
Planning design activities
Setting goals
1on1s
Initial talk
Accessibility
Being accessible is not only a good practice for legal reasons (to avoid getting sued, like the Dominos case, it’s also the right thing to do (being more inc...
Personas
About personas
Design Principles
Formulating design principles