“treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone…” – Paul Cezanne, 1904 Effective Agile UX turns product design into a collaborative, cross-functional process. A great way to do this is to pull non-designers into a fast-paced, fun sketching workshop (I’ll post more notes from the Agile UX conference on this soon). One… Continue reading
Date Archives February 2012
The Missing Agile Principle (Agile UX 2012 talk)
Earlier today I gave a talk called “The Missing Agile Principle”, which was all about the need to focus on value, and not get lost in process or consider the job done at shipping the product. I touched on why I thought UX was up for the task, how I thought UX should learn to… Continue reading
Startup Hiring Filter: Are you “pre” or “post” product market fit?
Your startup finally has the financial resources to expand the team. That’s both awesome, and dangerous. So here is one more filter for you to think about as you evaluate each candidate: Is your company “pre” product-market fit*, or “post”? (I’m not talking about your pitch to VCs but your own honest assessment) And has… Continue reading
Lean Experiments 101 (given to IxD program at SVA)
In late January, Gary Chou and Christina Cacioppo asked me to come talk about lean startup ideas to their “Entrepreneurial Design” class in SVA’s Interaction Design masters program. Christina just wrote up some thoughts from the day and they put up the audio file. I have embedded the slides and audio file below: MVP/Experiments talk… Continue reading
Unhealthy Interpretations of Apple Mythology
“And rather than listening to, or asking their customers what they wanted; Apple would solve problems customers didn’t know they had with products they didn’t even realize they wanted.” — Allworth James Allworth over at HBR wrote a nice post on Apple and how their focus on great products, rather than optimizing profitability, helped them… Continue reading
My day at Leancamp NYC
I spent yesterday attending Leancamp’s New York session and it was an interesting day. It was my first “unconference” and I liked the democratic, “vote with your feet”, “your day is what you make of it” feel. Photo from Lukas Fittl Here is an overview of my experience
The Zuck Highlights
Like many, I just read Mark Zuckerberg’s S-1 letter. There are two things I really appreciated: the focus on long-term value, and the results-oriented innovation culture it espoused. The letter states that the company wants to embrace risk and focus on long term value, not “maximizing investor returns” or quarterly performance. I’m glad to see… Continue reading
Collaboration vs Individualism is a False Choice
Susan Cain in the NYTimes wrote a broadside against collaboration, calling it groupthink. Now Cliff Kuang in Design.Co writes “the brainstorming process is BS.” Honestly, I don’t get the fuss. Isn’t it obvious that creativity and innovation is enhanced by both introspective and collaborative time? I’m only a fan of collaborative idea generation sessions *if*… Continue reading