Update: check out my book on customer development Talking to Humans Steve Blank always liked to say, “In a startup, no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.” The lean startup movement encourages that you get out of the building with a mixture of experiments and qualitative research. Doing qualitative work gives you several benefits. It helps you learn …
Group sketching, yes! Groupthink, no!
I am a big believer in the necessity of sketching for good product design and product-team interaction. So, I was nodding my head vehemently when it came to Joshua Porter’s latest post, “The importance of sketching in product design“. Group sketching allows a team to get on the same page very quickly. In addition to preventing confusion or conflict, group …
Ain’t nothing wrong with making your ugly site suck a little less
Via Josh Porter, I just read Aral Balkan’s rant about a recent article that made the rounds on hacker news called “How to Make Your Site Look Half-Decent in Half an Hour“. The thrust of Aral’s rant is “design is not veneer”. And yeah, I get it. My colleagues and readers here have heard me make that same grumble. Some …
You can’t judge a designer by glossy buttons
A common meme in tech circles has been the death of the resume. It goes: judge developers by their Github account, and designers by a Dribbble portfolio. The latter begs the question, what does design mean to people? To me, product designers solve problems. They solve problems concerning motivation, usability, desirability and alignment with business goals. I love a beautiful …
Don’t be that guy
We needed a design for a t-shirt, and we needed it fast. It’s early 1995 at Trilogy, a 90-person enterprise software company. I’m in product marketing for Conquer (a new initiative which got renamed the slightly less hubristic “pcOrder.com”). We had just made a snap decision to buy a booth at a conference that was literally about to happen. We …
Increase Collaboration Through Sketching
“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 of the first things you …
Strategic UX vs Tactical UX
There are strategic UX leaders, and then there are tactical UX implementers. To be a strategic leader, one needs to broaden thinking beyond design and usability, and start thinking holistically about critical business goals and risks. As the broader UX profession moves from being artifact-based to results-based, this is going to be critical. However, I see the online UX community …
Free Your Mind
A core concept in “lean startup” is that validated learning needs to be your initial measure of progress, not deliverables of other kinds. However, I suspect that many people struggle to internalize this and fully put it to work. Learning doesn’t feel like traditional measures of success. It’s not a line up and to the right; it’s not a successfully …
Lean Wireframing
Will Evans, who does UX design at The Ladders with agile-UX champion Jeff Gothelf, recently wrote a tweet that caught my eye: The hi-fidelity vs. lo-fidelity wireframe debate is silly. You use the weapons you need based on the war you face. (link) A wireframe is meant to communicate and test. You want to do the least amount of work …
Problem > UX > UI
Jason Cohen’s recent post got me thinking about the difference between UX and UI and the order in which I think about design when coming up with something new. Here is my rough order (and tomorrow I will post a concrete example): 1. The Problem Understand the customer’s problem and ask yourself if you are solving the right problem Example …