credits Starting new jobs make me nervous. Have I been a designer for a long time? It feels to me like forever, but comparatively it’s a definite no. The anxiety began when I realized I needed to quit my current job. At the time I was working in UX and front-end development as an offshore… Continue reading On UX Anxiety (Part I)
Category: UX
Frequent vs. infrequent designers — and more UX links this week
If you like the links, don’t forget to ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Frequent vs. infrequent designers — and the tools designed for them → Frequent designers are people who routinely design for a certain platform (apps or websites or VR or chatbots or any other) and using a certain design tool (Sketch or Principle or Illustrator and so on). They… Continue reading Frequent vs. infrequent designers — and more UX links this week
College majors for UX design
I see this question a lot around the internet: “What should I major in if I want to pursue a career in UX design?” As a college student and incoming product design intern at Facebook, I’ve done a lot of research on this question. It’s important to recruit new people to the field of user experience,… Continue reading College majors for UX design
Start your designs with a concept — and more UX links this week
If you like the links, don’t forget to ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Start your designs with a concept → The best designers I know always start a project with a concept (or conceptual model). What’s your design concept for this project? How do you envision people interacting with your product? What model are you trying to emulate in… Continue reading Start your designs with a concept — and more UX links this week
The Brand: the forgotten child in Design Thinking
Just as ‘we are our brain’, companies ‘are their brand’. It defines why they exist, why they do what they do and what distinguishes them from competition. The often quoted Simon Sinek framework of the ‘why, how and what‘ is a perfect way to answer the question: ‘why are we doing what we’re doing?’, and… Continue reading The Brand: the forgotten child in Design Thinking
4 tips to take your school design projects to the next level
Courtesy of Green Chameleon from unsplash.com. Having attended public portfolio review events as well as getting a good dose of portfolio critique myself, I’ve noticed a few patterns in feedback — particularly about projects coming from school and bootcamps. While I haven’t attended a UX design bootcamp or gone back for a Master’s degree (yet), I’ve jotted… Continue reading 4 tips to take your school design projects to the next level
Designing Happy
Health problems stemming from stress and loneliness include: obesity, high blood pressure, alcoholism, depression, heart disease, insomnia, and stroke. The solution In surveying the landscape, one might think there are already solutions for this problem including traditional mental health solutions as well as new up-and-coming behavioral health startups. Newer solutions often require high levels of customer… Continue reading Designing Happy
Design Conferences are broken, but we can fix them
I just got back from a design conference. It was just one in a sea of poorly-designed design conferences I’ve attended over the years. I wont beat around the proverbial bush. Here are 3 easy ways for organizers to step up their game and put on an impactful, memorable, and successful design conference. Speakers are… Continue reading Design Conferences are broken, but we can fix them
Note-taking during design reviews — and more UX links this week
News & ideas Netflix Sans, a new custom typeface developed with Dalton Maag Intel just open sourced Stephen Hawking’s speech system There’s a new trend on the internet of editing famous songs like if they were playing in an empty mall or from another room In case you were left wondering, this is what an inclusion… Continue reading Note-taking during design reviews — and more UX links this week
Encouraging healthy lifestyle choices with an engaging user experience
Please note: This was a concept project undertaken as part of the User Experience Design Immersive course at General Assembly and is in no way affiliated with Nuffield Health. Nuffield Health is one of the UK’s leading not-for-profit healthcare organisations. They operate a wide variety of facilities and healthcare services, from gym and fitness centres… Continue reading Encouraging healthy lifestyle choices with an engaging user experience
Design is not Design, thoughts on IxDA 2018
From 6 Feb to 8 Feb, the conference had separate subjects for each of the three days. I am going to recommend and elaborate on one talk for each day to explain the thoughts behind the above statement I made. At the very end of this article, I will also recommend talks that I think… Continue reading Design is not Design, thoughts on IxDA 2018
How does design strategy work within a large enterprise?
Courtesy Dilbert Last October, I visited my alma mater, the School of Visual Arts Masters in Branding program, which teaches graduate students about the intersections of business & design. Whenever I visit, there’s always students that have questions about what I do, both as an IBM’er and a Design Strategist. Most recently, I was asked… Continue reading How does design strategy work within a large enterprise?
Cross-functional Empathy for Designers
A human-centric approach for working with humans As designers, a huge part of our job lies in empathizing with users. It’s exciting to see how far we’ve come as a discipline in becoming more user-centric, more research-driven and better at tying our ideas to actual user needs. Yet many of us struggle with applying that… Continue reading Cross-functional Empathy for Designers
Stop blaming your digital tools for your problems
Jira, Trello, Basecamp, Sketch, Invision, Zeplin, Jenkins, Google Analytics — I could go on, but no matter the tool or how good it is there will always be a problem with it. Your tools are not the problem, your reliance and attitude towards them is. I’ve seen so many teams complain that “Jira doesn’t let me do this”… Continue reading Stop blaming your digital tools for your problems
AI-Driven UX Design
What impact might AI have on UX? My take on how we can design for AI. How will Artificial Intelligence impact UX design? How can we design meaningful experiences in an era with AI-driven products & services? How will this creative process look like? These questions keep clouding my mind, and I like to give… Continue reading AI-Driven UX Design
A series of interviews with senior UX leaders to celebrate International Women’s Day
Meet Elizabeth Elizabeth Churchill is currently a Director of User Experience at Google. She is an applied social scientist working in the area of human computer interaction, computer mediated communication, mobile/ubiquitous computing and social media. Elizabeth is the current Secretary/Treasurer of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s premier professional society for computer science… Continue reading A series of interviews with senior UX leaders to celebrate International Women’s Day
From a Handful of Beans to the Starbucks Experience
“A person’s hands holding a coffee cup and pouring cream into it” by Taylor Franz on Unsplash How much does a cup of coffee cost these days? Depending on where you buy your beverage, anything from $1 to $6. And while you’ve probably guessed right, that the $1 option is a McDonald’s special, likely you’re also… Continue reading From a Handful of Beans to the Starbucks Experience
Five analytical components for a better user experience
User Behaviour Whatever someone does while on your website is called user behaviour. It includes the journey within your website’s pages, interaction with page elements, page scroll, form submissions, link/button clicks, and others. Analytics will help you understand the user behavior of your website better. How far are they scrolling down the page? Which forms… Continue reading Five analytical components for a better user experience
InVision Studio is out—but are designers migrating to a new tool again?
Why would someone switch from Sketch to Invision Studio? Well, to answer this question I decided to look at what the community is talking about online. Here are some of the answers I found on Quora. Opinions seem pretty divided. 1.“It depends on its performance — if it improves my workflow. Sketch is pretty simple and has many… Continue reading InVision Studio is out—but are designers migrating to a new tool again?
Inclusive Design Mindset
At the end of a 72-hour race to complete the Student Design Challenge (SDC) hosted by Microsoft at IxDA this year, I was prompted to think about how my experience could not only benefit future designers, but also public school teachers. The challenge was to design an interactive way to teach rhythm to a student… Continue reading Inclusive Design Mindset
Analysing Usability Testing Data
Gathering feedback from your users is a crucial part of any design process. The way in which you can gather this feedback varies depending on what kind of questions you are trying to answer, the resources you have available for user research and what stage of the product life cycle you are currently in. Qualitative… Continue reading Analysing Usability Testing Data
Building brand trust through UX Design
Be Secure Are you building an eCommerce website? Are you going to make the credit/debit card transactions happen on your website? This section is critical. What are the chances you would give your credit/debit card information to any random eCommerce website? None, right? I know your website is not the dodgy site still trying to… Continue reading Building brand trust through UX Design
Personas, jobs to be done, user needs = goals + pain points
Recently I’ve been working on discovering unmet user needs for my company using the Job-To-Be-Done framework, and I saw some arguments between people who use personas and people who use jobs-to-be-done (JTBD). A common critique of using personas from the JTBD people is that personas tend to focus on the attributes of the users (like… Continue reading Personas, jobs to be done, user needs = goals + pain points
How to be a Product Designer.
My new and improved portfolio. whoistaneisha.com I might be a Product Designer now, but I didn’t always know that’s what I would be when I started my career. Let me start at the beginning of my journey. I went to college for Fine Arts and had found my way to where I am through a… Continue reading How to be a Product Designer.