Moving From Perfection To Purpose

A very important lesson I’ve learned throughout my career is this:  it will never be perfect. 

Yes, it’s hard for me to admit that! But, over time I’ve learned this is best for the business and user.

Earlier in my career, I remember the temptation to hold a design or feature launch until it was perfect. I remember sitting with a founder and reviewing designs in Photoshop with him pointing out every little pixel to perfect. The truth is, many of the changes were so subtle that they wouldn’t even matter once the design got to the browser. Many of the designs were purely form and had nothing to do with function.

I can’t believe I just typed that because I believe in beautiful design. But it’s not enough to look nice. Design must perform. Design must inform. Design must transform someone from being an acquaintance to an actual user and ideally an ambassador.

Purposeful design trumps beautiful design.Continue reading

Getting Started In UX: Changing The Mindset Of UX Ownership

Almost two years ago I wrote a post called Why Everyone Can’t Be A User Experience Designer. The post came at a time when I was working internal at a company and was faced with a massive amount of input on how the product. Of course, input is always great — it’s much better than silence. The main problem was that the input was very, very specific and I was often asked to implement this input literally rather than drill down into the true ask behind the input. As a result, it felt like everyone was trying to be the user experience designer. The changing UX ownership made it challenging for me to do great work.

I recently read a post called User Experience Belongs To Everybody by Cap Watkins (@cap) who is a design lead at Etsy. In the post Cap writes, “lately, it has occurred to me that the user experience of a product actually doesn’t and shouldn’t belong solely to the designer.”

I have to agree with Cap. The user experience is not just about someone’s interaction with your website or app. The user experience goes beyond the screen. The user experience encapsulates every single interaction someone has with your brand. Given that today brands have many different touch-points (email, social media, customer service, printed material, etc) it’s seemingly impossible for one person to own the entire user experience.Continue reading

The Value Of Investing In Design

As companies become more aware of the value of design and the expectation that consumers have for a good experience, a key question lies in the value of design. How much time should you invest in design? How much money do you have to invest in design to see a return? At what point in your product’s lifecycle should you focus on design versus simply features?

These are all great questions that are hard to answer because it’s very dependent on the context of the specific product — its resources, team, stage of development, and audience.

Justifying the value of investing in design is always a challenge (in my experience). There’s constant pressure to get to market because of competitor concerns or simply because a company has tied themselves to a launch date (which I really don’t recommend).Continue reading

Getting Started In User Experience Design: Tools of the trade

A lot of people ask me what tools they need to learn in order to get started in user experience design. The truth is, I really don’t like this question! There’s a misconception that knowing a tool will somehow elevate you in the job market.

It doesn’t matter how well you know how the tool. What matters is what you do with that tool. What matters is how you use that tool to communicate ideas, to rapidly test concepts, and to help create a story that everyone on your team can participate in and contribute to.

My career started when someone gave me an early copy of Dreamweaver and Photoshop and told me to make a website about something I was interested in. So, I made a website about a fake ski resort. Though seemingly a silly exercise, it was fundamental in my understanding of how design and technology must work together. In doing that little project, I remember being less intimidated by actuallyContinue reading

Everyday UX: The User Experience Of CitiBike

As a user experience designer, in the back of my mind I am always critiquing and improving experiences that happen to me in my life. Here are some insights I had while trying out CitiBike.

On Sunday, my cousin was visiting from London and we wanted to make a full day in New York City. So we met at 7:45 am and got CitiBikes near Wall Street.

Overall, it was a fantastic experience. We rode the CitiBikes from Wall Street to 84th Street where we discovered the beautiful world of Riverside Park and found out where the Boat Basin Cafe is. We then headed back down the 59th Street where we thought we’d get a mimosa at the Plaza Hotel, because what else do you do at 10:30am on a Sunday morning in Midtown? As we learned, there’s a law in New York City that you can’t serve alcohol on a Sunday before 12pm. Who knew?!Continue reading

Getting Started In User Experience: It Will Never Be Perfect

One of the biggest mistakes that we made at my first company was that we tried to get it perfect on the first try. Countless months were spent trying to make every single interaction, page, and pixel just p-e-r-f-e-c-t. If we’d only known! This was before MVP became a term people used on a daily basis. I’ll never forget a moment when I was talking with a former team member and they said “I wish we’d just started this as an iPhone app and then built a full product.”

The hard truth is that when you have an idea, it’s easy for it to just build and build and build in your mind. It’s just like when you are telling a story and you keep adding to the story with “and then, and then, and then”.

Continue reading

Managing Input & The Art Of Pushback

art of pushback

The art of pushback is a topic that I learned about through a very personal experience. As a user experience designer, one thing you become very good at is managing input. It is your job to listen to and identify problems, design solutions, and gather and evaluate input from everyone involved.

But, what happens when the input isn’t quite applicable to the project at hand? What happens when you have to say “no” to input that some people provide?

Saying “no” to someone else’s idea is never easy.Continue reading