Many of us are consultants, work for agencies, or are freelancers which means that we get to meet a lot of different clients and work on a wide range of different projects. All of these projects come with their share of opportunities, challenges, laughs and lows. Some teams you’ll get on with better than with others, and some will naturally gel straight away, whilst others will take effort and time. There will be projects that don’t go your way, and some that allow you to over-deliver and out-do yourself. There’s …

 
It’s important to collaborate because it allows the team to become a powerful unit, full of common knowledge and questions. Each individual has a clear view of what is going on and has the power to affect the product direction and evolution. If as a designer you do not collaborate with the rest of the product team, you essentially deny yourself this right. By pairing with the QA, (front and back end) developers, BA, PM and anyone else who is part of your team, you gain all of the necessary …

As some of you know, Cathie Hagan, Megan Cook and I recently ran a workshop at SxSW entitled: “AXD: Agile Experience Design“. This was a good mix of skills, as Cathie is from the BA practice and Megan is a bit of a hybrid between BA and XD.
What we did:
We were allocated a 60min slot to run a workshop on Agile Experience design. There was a diverse audience of designers, developers, managers and company owners. Some were familiar with Agile, many were not. We wanted to teach some fundamental principles …

photo credit: workshoppe
Self-reported skills are typically very inaccurate. Inexperienced users tend to overestimate their skills (because they don’t realise their own incompetence), and experienced users tend to underestimate their skill level (they are aware of the edges of their knowledge and all the things that remain to be learnt). It is important to realise that the only way to really gage the skill level of someone is to directly test that particular skill. If you’re going to have a decent sample size, and ship a product in a reasonable …

Here is my brief attempt at describing what it is some of us do. Emphasis has been placed on simplicity of message.

Listening is arguably the most important skill you can have as an experience designer. Very very few of us know how to listen to others. It is not a skill that is taught very well at schools in general, or in universities. Most of us don’t even know what it means to listen, which means that we don’t even know where to begin to learn this precious and underrated skill.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “listening” as:
1: to pay attention to sound
2: to hear something with thoughtful attention
Many of you, I suspect, …

It’s not always easy to have an XD presence in a team, or to clients that are very new to the discipline. It’s also not always easy to talk about XD when everyone around the boardroom table is unfamiliar with it. The other scenario is that everyone thinks they know everything about it already, because they either know about UI or have used an interface before. As we know a whole lot more comes into experience design other than GUI design, or making it all look pretty.
XD debt:
Additionally, ensuring that XD …

photo credit: poppet with a camera
I read a lot of books, especially about experience design, consulting, Agile and innovation. The last few months I’ve read a seriously good batch of XD books, and I wanted to share with you those titles. I think they’re useful for people both new to field and the vetarans too. There’s such a wide choice of books around this relatively new subject, and there are a lot of useless ones too unfortunately. This list has a bunch of books I enjoyed reading and that …

photo credit: Roebot
I have seen a lot of usability test results in my time, and I have also carried out a whole truck load these tests myself. I find that a lot of people carrying out these tests are unaware of the statistical analysis necessary to interpret the results of the test. When I ask:
- “Why did you only use 5 people?”
The answer is often:
- “Because that’s what Nielsen says to use”
The problem is that the Nielsen 5 user rule is correct only in very very specific circumstances, and …

The Situation:
Designing in an Agile development environment requires transparency, clear communication and frequent delivery. Teams will work in sprints (typically 2 weeks) with a focus on making software rather than documentation. Wireframes are useful for designers to work out interactions, potential pitfalls, communicate design ideas, and are very useful to the development process. They are a visual representation of the layout of features and content of a user interface or website, and I would also add, in many cases how things in it get used and behave.
They are however …