Adapting Design Thinking Methods to a Team’s Cultural Dimensions

When you start incorporating design thinking into a business, you usually bring more than practices. Why? The methods of design thinking are rooted in collaboration, out-of-the-box thinking, and taking measured risks. And at some companies, these attitudes are downplayed, or even outright discouraged. Bringing design thinking into a company like this can be very challenging. […]

More Ways to Test – Nightmare Headlines

The recent furor over the Iowa caucus results where an app caused chaos reminded me of The Nightmare Headline Game, which can be a great technique to assess risk and the level of testing needed. It can also be a fun game to let a team’s imagination run wild. Maybe you’re not writing an app […]

Design Thinking Toolkit, Activity 18 – What’s On Your Radar?

Looking for a great icebreaker or a quick way to gather folk’s thoughts or overall impressions? Wondering what a stakeholder’s highest priority is? Look no further than What’s On Your Radar? This is part of our series on Design Thinking Methods and Activities. You’ll find a full list of posts in this series at the […]

A Designer’s Guide to Scraping Data from HTML Pages with Artoo

Gathering real data for your digital designs can be a real challenge. Without access to the client’s data, we’re often on our own—reliant on bad mock data or Lorem ipsum. But don’t worry, Artoo can help solve this problem by web scraping HTML pages for you. Artoo is a neat little web scraper that will […]

Sketching Apps for iPad: Paper vs Procreate vs Affinity Designer

As a designer, I often have opportunities to sketch out ideas for clients – I might be in the wireframing stage of the design and want to get ideas on paper quickly, or I might need to create a logo or illustration. However, it can be a pain to get a paper sketch to a […]

UX Wins & Sins: HidrateSpark 3

Welcome to UX Wins & Sins, the blog series that reviews popular products and digital experiences to glean design lessons from what’s working (the wins!) and what’s not (the sins). Splish, Splash!💧We’re taking a hydrating bath with the HidrateSpark 3, an intake-monitoring, Las Vegas light show of a water bottle. Photo credit to HidrateSpark. Design […]

The Importance of an Interface: A Case Study of Simple Bank

Businesses that interact with their customers via the internet face increasing pressure to provide a quality user interface. As a customer of many online services, I expect websites to have a beautiful design, function intuitively, and work at a reasonable pace. A lot of web applications go far beyond this, providing a user experience that’s […]

More Ways to Test – Learning from Fairy Tales

When coming up with data to test out your app, you might get stuck deciding what to enter. We’ve all used our own name and data or the classic “asdf asdf 123.” One way to get creative with your testing is to turn to fairy tales. And there’s a concept we can clearly learn from […]

Four Sources of Creative Inspiration for a New Design

A blank canvas. Infinite possibilities. Now… start creating. This feeling of creating something from nothing is probably familiar to anyone starting a new project. The pressure to create the best work yet (and fast!) can get in the way of just exploring some ideas. When I’m seeking inspiration, I look for threads to pull — […]

What You Can Learn by Studying Design Maturity Models

I recently worked on a project that involved assessing a corporation’s design system. As a part of that research, my team came across the idea of a design maturity model in a study published by Invision. This model helps assess how well design is being applied in an organization. Since we often receive feedback about […]

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