“As we practice Lean UX, it becomes a mindset. It becomes a way of thinking about our development and design process.” That’s what Jeff Gothelf said to me when I asked him to explain all this fuss about Lean UX. As our clients are moving to more rapid development processes, like Agile’s Scrum, their design [...]

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Four Stages of Competence. These four stages are unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. As someone learns and adapts to your design, they are working their way through the stages. The ultimate is the user who is unconsciously competent — they can seemingly move [...]

The migration to agile and lean development methods has thrown a wrench into the world of user experience professionals. Now on unfamiliar ground, these professionals want to know what new techniques and tricks help integrate UX into the development process. As we study what makes teams successful, we realize that the successful teams aren’t doing [...]

In full-day workshops, it’s not uncommon for the workshop instructor to put together exercises. When the workshop is about design, those exercises are often design projects, where the attendees work through the techniques while building something. Now, what they are building is usually some made-up project, constructed to practice the techniques. The actual results of [...]

One of the joys of putting together a conference, like the annual User Interface Conference, is the great conversations I have with all the smart people who show up. This year was no exception, and one conversation that stood out was a quick discussion I had with Kim Goodwin, author of Designing in the Digital [...]

Because my son is a professional magician, I’ve picked up a bit of magician’s lore over the years. Amongst the pros, they have a saying: “If you want to learn a new trick, read an old book.” Turns out, there’s a lot of excellent illusions which have been lost for years that, when you bring [...]

John Gruber has it partially right: When companies release these futuristic videos (like Microsoft and RIM), they are doing it for PR. And I agree with Gruber that if those companies don’t have a current experience that matches the awesomeness of the videos, then they are sending mixed messages. However, where I think Mr. Gruber [...]

On the trail of exploring our next career move, it’s likely we’ll need to show the path we’ve been on. As part of a design team, that usually means displaying our work. However, if we didn’t make proper arrangements before we took the job, it’s very likely we can’t show much of our work to [...]

“The problem with this is there’s too much clutter.” That’s what the legal secretary told me when we were studying her firm’s intranet home page. In fact, the page was pretty sparse in layout. The text was nicely laid out in a readable font, with different weights given to headings and body text. Overall, it [...]

Getting your head around a complex design is, dare I say, a complex process. It’s difficult to understand why your users are struggling with all the features and concepts they want and need in your design. One cause is that we tend to think of complexity as a holistic effect. We try to decide if [...]