UX Design
The agile design process incorporates different ceremonies to ensure a successful user experience and foster greater shared understanding among the product team. These activities are:
When conducting these ceremonies, there are two things to keep in mind: attendance and cadence. Continue reading “Design Ceremonies in Agile” →
It’s your first day as a user experience designer at a new company. You’re excited not only to design and prototype and pretend you’re more font savvy than your more experienced peers, but also to dig in and start doing some user research. You ask the rest of the team what kind of user research they do. You are met with some waffling around the topic but the answer makes itself clear to you. There is no user research being done.
I’m assuming I’m not the only one this has happened to. You’re hired on as a user experience designer and the existing team or business does everything but talk to the end user. Instead of being discouraged, take this as an opportunity. You are going to build a user research offering. The question is, how?
Continue reading “How to Start a User Research Practice From Scratch” →
It’s a more exciting time than ever to be designing the digital frontier. And why shouldn’t it be? Americans on average are spending upwards of 10 hours of time looking at digital content on screens a day. For better or for worse, digital design is the future.
It’s fitting then to focus on bringing digital design into the future. Namely, by looking at what we need to leave behind.
The goal of Southwest Ohio Givecamp (SWOGC) is to deliver a non-profit with a website, app, database (whatever they need, digitally) over the course of one weekend. It was a fantastic experience. The opportunity to work with non-profits from all over Southwest Ohio was a humbling experience. These groups are saving lives and making a substantial impact all over the region so the pressure was on to deliver solutions worthy of their significance.
While I jumped around between a couple of projects during my time at Givecamp, I primarily focused on a project for a group called eXclusive Services. eXs provides a handful of vital services to those struggling with addiction in the Cincinnati area. They are also the only group in the Cinci area providing primary care medical services alongside addiction services. The eXs team was wonderful and when they cited their need for a UI/UX designer, I was happy to jump headfirst into helping them build a solution.
I have recently been playing a lot of Halo studying the design of the Halo series and have been struck with how the elements at play in a game like Halo can inform user centered design in any field.
The ultimate goal of any video game is that its users are enjoying themselves. This is what determines whether a game is good and if it sells any copies.
Imagine if everything we designed had this same goal? What if we designed everything with the mindset that if it wasn’t enjoyable to use, it would not be a success? As simple as it sounds, it’s deceptively hard to do.
Continue reading “Design Principles Learned From Playing Halo” →
I was reminded during last week’s Apple Keynote reveal extravaganza of one of the more obscure features of iOS.
It was on the slide where they were discussing the iPhone’s home button where there was a brief mention made of “Reachability”.
With two taps to the iPhone’s TouchID sensor (See: Home button), the bottom part of your screen is folded down, giving you easier access to the top part of your screen. This was implemented in 2014 with the iPhone 6 and has quietly existed inside iOS ever since.
Becoming a designer has been a difficult and winding path. It looks like a difficult and winding path ahead too. But I’ve learned a lot along the way. Here are 5 steps I’ve taken to become a better designer.
Continue reading “5 Steps to Becoming a Problem Solving Designer” →
You may have noticed that things are getting more and more black and white. I’m not talking about morality, but rather our digital interfaces. Every day it seems that another site or mobile app has updated and stripped out all the color from their world. I’d like to coin the term, “Reverse Pleasantville Effect”.
I take it back, that’s a terrible term.
But, it does accurately convey where we’re headed.
Continue reading “Less is More: Thoughts on The Black & White Design Trend” →
For this redux design, I decided to tackle the browser portal for the Xbox store which can be found here: https://store.xbox.com/en-US/.
The current Xbox store’s site is maddening to me for a variety of reasons, but here are a few of the most pressing:
How was it? Surprisingly refreshing!
