Facilitation is an important skill, whether with collocated or remote teams. It drives conversation and collaboration. The ability to facilitate well is integral when conducting participatory design activities, giving a presentation, or even giving a virtual seminar. Russ joins Adam Churchill to discuss the book and the various types of facilitation in this podcast.

So here’s the thing: Innovation isn’t a bad word. Overused? Perhaps. But not bad. How do I know this? Because cheese in bread, cookie dough in ice cream, and Genius Bars inside Apple stores are AMAZING. These are just a few examples of innovation that create great user experiences. They’re creative ways of putting existing [...]

Before Cirque de Soleil, if you thought about a circus, you thought about elephants and lions and poodles that jumped through hoops of fire. The animals were there to make the kids happy. Cirque decided to do something different: no animals. Because they chose no animals, their costs dropped tremendously. It turns out that moving, [...]

Lou Adler’s Hire With Your Head is a hidden treasure. The best $19.77 you’ll ever spend. It will help you ensure you get the absolute best UX team, even though ‘user experience’ is not mentioned once in the entire book. Lou shares several head-slappingly simple techniques for hiring the best folks, which is something you [...]

Here’s a simple trick that will produce dramatic improvements in your product or service: bring the developers to your usability tests. Have them spend time watching users actually use the things they’ve built. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and every time it’s exactly the same. As soon as they see someone working with [...]

Yesterday, a couple of hundred of my favorite UX folks tuned in to my UIE Virtual Seminar while I talked about the ways to use the Kano Model as the basis of a winning UX strategy. During the talk, I referenced a bunch of things, so here’s the list: Understanding the Kano Model – A [...]

In today’s UIEtips, I discusses the difference between failed and missed expectations, and how to avoid them. Here’s an excerpt from the article. When many folks reach into their user research toolbox, the first tools to emerge are surveys and usability testing. However, these are not that helpful with discovering potential missed expectations. Surveys are [...]

In today’s UIEtips, guest writer Kevin M. Hoffman shares four simple, easy-to-remember guidelines about how to convey information.Here’s an excerpt from the article. A college lecture and a business meeting are similar in that they are both mechanisms for conveying structured information. It’s also common that in both situations, not everyone in the room is [...]

Mark Schaefer loves Home Depot. He wrote this blog post about how much. However, in that same post, he talked about a breakdown in the experience of being a Home Depot shopper. I’ve been going to Home Depot for 20 years and have spent untold thousands of dollars on home improvement and landscaping materials. I [...]

Recently, we’ve interviewed dozens of design managers about what separates out their best designers from the rest. One of the consistent answers we’ve gotten is “The best designers are passionate about design, yet dispassionate about their own designs.” The managers tell us they look for folks who get very excited and curious about creating great [...]