Management

this second article on the UX Playbook (published on productcraft.com), I highlight each of the four Mega-plays and decompose one into its constituent micro-plays. 

COVID and the global pandemic’s impact on working norms continue to raise questions about the nature of work and the “new normal.” How much time should employees be “in the office?” What is the impact of a fully remote workforce on an organization’s productivity, innovation and culture? By shifting work to our homes, how do organizations address employee safety, equity, access and privilege? These are just some of the questions athenahealth (the second largest electronic health records company in the US) raised in its “Future of Work” strategic initiative.

Design Operations - the optimization of people, processes and tools in service of design benefits from applying Design Thinking frameworks.

In a series of articles I've written for UXMatters, I describe an approach to writing proposals for services that distinguish your value proposition from your competition by leveraging three key principles: 1. Bill by "piece work" 2. Be transparent 3. Put your customer in control of the scope of effort

Throughout this series, I've been using Architecture (bricks-and-mortar Architecture, capitalized) as an analogy for UX architecture (lower-case). Because Architecture has "had a seat at the table" for hundreds of years, perhaps we can learn from its success and apply those lessons to UX architecture, thereby increasing UX architecture's strategic value. In the next installments, I turn to more tactical concerns: the deliverables and processes required to execute on a UX architecture. In this piece, I discuss how different stakeholders require very different deliverables. I also discuss how Architecture and UX architecture differ in terms of stakeholder understanding about the desired outcome. Awhile…

Continuing the thoughts from the most recent article, I dig deeper into how UX architecture pervades the entire enterprise, assuming the enterprise has anything to do with people. World-class UX architecture is world-class systems design. It takes an ecosystem approach to considering the users' experience of the enterprise's products and services. UX Architecture as System Thinking UX architecture identifies, describes and designs an ecosystem of use for an organization's product or service. What constitutes such an ecosystem? Where does an "ecosystem of use" begin or end? 10 years ago, the answers to those questions were still emerging. Today, we have a body of…

In the first few installments of this commentary, I propose Architecture is (by definition) a political act and an essential strategic element of business. Within the corporate cubicles, whether as employees or as creative consultants,  user experience professionals advocate for users—their agendas, their needs and their emotional experiences. We promote users' needs up the food chain until they are a strategic element of the organization. Many organizations have reaped the benefits of integrating users experience into their offerings. There are many many more which have not. User Experience strategy and architecture is not achieved solely through visual treatments or updated content.…

In this continuation of a series of articles about UX Architecture, I suggest that Architecture, by definition, is a strategic asset. Its strategic impact makes Architecture different from other types of design.

A 30 minute presentation to UX recruiters, helping them help ::us.:: In this short video, I suggest ways to write UX job reqs that avoid attracting mythical beasts.