Over time, intranets can become beastly things. Yes, the very intranet that was supposed to provide a great one-stop-shop for all information has now become a confusing jumble of pages that lack findability, ownership, and currency. On April 4, James Robertson will show you the two fundamental questions you’ll need to answer before untangling your [...]

Lean UX can eliminate the contractual obligations inherent with specification documents and other deliverables. Designers and developers find it frustrating to put so much effort into a project then not see it ship at the end. Using the Lean UX process, you’re constantly validating your designs, especially early in the process. This motivates the team to work towards the same end goal.

After selling out the original 100 seats for the UX Immersion Conference, we decided to extend the lowest price of $1,349 until Wednesday, February 29. The price will definitely go up, so register now and save money. Don’t miss out on the newest, most critical thinking around two separate and important UX topics: mobile design [...]

It’s amazing how learning a new skill or process can make you feel overwhelmed and out of your comfort zone. Sometimes we’re asked to follow a set of tasks or procedures that just doesn’t make sense and seems repetitious. Yet after a period of time we start to see how these tasks connect, make sense, [...]

The goal of Lean UX is to take the focus of user-centered design off of documentation and put it squarely on the experience. The way to do this is to view any design idea as a hypothesis. With a focus on the experience, you can validate or invalidate this hypothesis much quicker. The sooner you reach this validation, the sooner you can focus on designing and building the correct solution.

[This is part 2 of a two-part post. For this article to make sense, you probably want to read part 1. This article was originally published on JohnnyHolland.org.] In the last installment, we talked about the distinction between Hands contractors and Brains consultants. Hands are brought in by the team as an extra resource to [...]

Opinion wars kill design projects. An opinion war happens when two or more people hold strongly held opinions that are in opposition of each other. Opinion wars can get messy. They can stop a team in its tracks. And the worst thing about them is they can’t be won. There is never a winner in [...]

We’ve been studying this for some time now and the reality is harsh: A co-located design team will have an easier time of producing great designs than a remote team. That doesn’t mean co-located teams will always succeed – they don’t. It doesn’t mean that remote teams will always fail – they don’t either. In [...]

[This article originally appeared at Johnny Holland.] What’s the difference between contracting and consulting? One major difference comes down to whether the job is handwork or brainwork. Whether you’re an “innie” or an “outie,” this is applicable. Innies are UX professionals who work inside an organization. Even though they are part of the company, they [...]

Want to achieve a dramatic innovation in your design’s user experience? That’s easy. Just increase the hours of exposure to real users that your design team has. In our research, we found successful design teams have each team member spend a minimum of two hours every six weeks watch real users interacting with either their [...]