I’ll be honest, this started as a standard post about methods and case studies, but it turned out differently. If you came for a huge case study, you are in the wrong place, but I still hope you find something interesting here. These are just bits and pieces, little personal stories about how I got into field research.
Being agile is cool. You do it because, hey, everybody is agile now – or at least they seem to be. I guess you’ve got familiar with the fun procedures, read three articles, convinced your team members and BOOM! You’re doing it. Or, are you?
If I told you that you were an addict, you would most likely object. You aren’t a drinker, you quit smoking when your sweet baby boy was born and you haven’t done anything else in your life. Addiction is a complex topic in psychology and can occur in many forms. Often, it is assumed it means only to compulsively engage in drug and alcohol abuse, but the fact is that behavioral addiction can occur with all the negative consequences in a person’s life as well. It can include staying glued to YouTube instead of working, constantly checking email, shamelessly answering WhatsApp while meeting with friends, thus multitasking and dividing attention incessantly. Thanks to the new technology, most of the Western world displays serious behavioral addiction, so much so that last year, an editorial in The American Journal of Psychiatry raised the prospect of adding “Internet addiction” to the DSM.
For a few days, I was on top of the world. Everything went well, and life was beautiful. Then the shitstorm kicked in and suddenly I felt everything collapse. All the things I’d built fell apart. This is the frightening roller-coaster ride of being a tech CEO. Only we know what it feels like when ups and downs are coming with high intensity, sometimes even multiple times a week.
To be honest, reading books is a constant struggle for me. I can’t count how many I have left half-read in the past years. It is even harder when I try reading non-fiction literature. However, I’m aware of the fact that this is one of the best ways to get in-depth knowledge about my profession, so from time to time I force myself to read a book. In this post, I collected those UX books that somehow managed to grab my attention, and which I can truly advise reading.
Every once in a while you should step out of the day-to-day treadmill of product development, take a deep breath, and look at the bigger picture. Today we introduce the UX Strategy Canvas which will help you do just that. You can get your team together, review your fresh user insights and your numbers, brainstorm on the next steps, and update your strategy. Depending on your product and market, you should do this every 2-4 months.
In this article I’d like to discuss a few examples about how you can use visual devices to help drive user behaviour. If we’re talking about visual design, you might think it only refers to how things look, but it’s goes much deeper than that. Visuality and good visual hints can add a lot to the understanding of how a digital product works and behaves. Over the course of these few paragraphs I’d like to emphasise the importance of good visual cues. ☝️
We are living in the era of distractive design and technology. We have many annoying electronic devices competing for our constant attention. As Mark Weiser said: “The scarcest resource in the 21st Century will not be technology, it will be attention.”
So how to compete on the digital market for this very scarce resource? This is what Calm Technology can help you with.
A good product roadmap is a very simple list of high-level goals you want to achieve in the next 3-6 months. This roadmap will guide your UX team (and everyone else) in the right direction. You also need to plan the next steps you take, which means planning the design sprints. Last, but not least, you have to define how designers and developers will work together. In this article I will share how to do all these things.
Within moments of meeting you, people decide all sorts of things about you, from intelligence to trustworthiness. Experts say it takes just three seconds for someone to determine whether they like you or not. When it comes to the digital world, decisions are made in a very similar way during user onboarding. Google has recently confirmed in their own research that users form opinions about a website in 50 milliseconds. Silicon Valley analyst Andrew Chen attests that 77 percent of users never use the app again 72 hours after the onboarding. So like it or not, if your app isn’t a knockout on the first impression, it’s probably going to be deleted or forgotten. But there is a way to enhance your app’s ‘first introduction’ and help your users discover your product’s benefits, functions, and usage – you just have to design a delightful onboarding experience. But how?
Bringing your team together can be a struggle from a distance. It’s a challenge for even experienced team leaders & product owners. From our experience, we have collected 7+3 points which will help you manage and bring your remote team together.
I suddenly woke up sweating in my bed. It was a sunny, but cold winter morning. The light peacefully illuminated my room through the window. Everything was calm and white outside. But I was breathing fast and my head was full of thoughts.
Why does it take two weeks for that feature? Do the devs work at all? We should add a better search. And chat option to the landing page. We don’t have the right target group. Will anybody use this at all? Will they ever admit that the core concept was wrong? Is it a product failure or a marketing issue? Our open rate sucks. What if we did a chatbot instead?
Okey. Slow down and take a deep breath. It’s time for that morning coffee.
There is definitely something wrong in the tech world nowadays. A new JS package manager comes out every single month. If you want to be hip you have to change your whole technology stack twice a year. Marketing got crazy. Do inbound. Do account based. Do Twitter. Do Snapchat. Do Instagram. Do live video. Do chatbots.
While we are flooded with trends and visions, we tend to forget the single most important thing in any product’s life: the people we build it for.
It all started 3,5 years ago when I became an entrepreneur. In half a year I had a team of 3, and we have doubled in size every year since then. And soon I realized, it’s all about people. Teammates, clients and the end users we design the products for.
I pushed it hard, we really did make great designs, but I started getting weird feedback from different sources. “You are a nice guy, but I would have handled that differently” or “Next time please be more ….”
I always thought I’m a social person, but from these kinds of feedback, I started to think I might in fact be an insensitive robot instead.
So what can a robot do when a noisy and messy world sends strange signals all the time? Well, I started to learn like a machine. And I started with the hardest challenge, firing someone.
Many designers still use Photoshop for literally everything. However, the market is full of increasingly better tools that focus on particular solutions. So I decided to compile a list of the most common tools that a UX designer should know about. In this list, you can find prototyping, UI and collaboration tools. Many of them will be familiar to you, but I hope you will find some interesting ones for specific tasks. My recommendation is to choose the appropriate tools for the task and don’t restrict yourself to one product. This list might also prove useful for comparing them with each other. So here comes our list of UX design tools.
Are you the one who has or deals with ecommerce sites somehow? Then I have news for you: You have to be a pro in UX. User experience is the key to your sites’ growth. There are plenty of case studies about this topic which focus on the best practices. In this article, I would like to give you another viewpoint with the 3 most important parts of the ecommerce UX. Those 3 fields are: customer service, checkout flow, and trust building.
Let’s see… Read More »
Remote work is getting more & more popular nowadays. It’s understandable: With the right tools in your hand, distance is not a burden anymore.
Think of it for a minute: you can work with the best professionals no matter where they are! Even from the other side of the world.
Yet, many Product owners, scrum masters, team leaders & members know that one of the weakest points of remote work is collaboration. Thus we’d like to offer you 5 practical ways how to solve remote work collaboration issues.
A bunch of developers published the ‘agile manifesto‘ in 2001 after they got fed up with the many software projects that hadn’t worked. They thought that these projects were too complicated and too slow, in other words, they weren’t sufficient enough. The developers had to do many unnecessary things. The system was inflexible and couldn’t cope with changes. It was difficult to plan projects which eventually weren’t accomplished on time. The participants were always stressed. And then the agile design process was born.
In an organisation with design culture, people don’t just work for their paychecks but they are passionately engaged in the creation of real results. These companies are built for creating great products and every member of the team wants to reach one goal: engage their customers with meaningful experiences.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
Says Peter Drucker. In a company with a healthy culture, customer satisfaction and progress is inevitable, because the company members are motivated and creating extremely high quality products. So then, we just have to sprinkle a bit “design culture” on your organisation, right? As always, it’s not that simple.
Building a design culture inside a company is not an easy task because it’s all about relationships, interactions and attitudes. But if we observe all the characteristics of a design culture, we can find some exact methods and techniques to work with.
What is it that everybody does in the UX industry, but does it differently? Probably one of correct answers is the UX design process. In this post I will guide you through our design process. Here’s how we do it at UX studio. Read More »
After working with many product teams in small and big companies, I collected the most important things you have to do while you build a digital product. This is the UX Minimum Checklist. It can help you to start building a design culture in your organization. It is not perfect. But still, it is a good startig point and a checklist for anyone. So does your team fit the minimum requirements?
