Sarah Doody
A few days ago I was visiting a friend of mine in Canada. She has her own business refinishing furniture and has become really successful at it. But it’s funny because growing up she was never into doing that type of stuff. She taught herself all about refinishing furniture by watching YouTube videos and simply doing it over and over.
Last weekend I was out at the beach two hours from NYC. To get to the beach I take a bus. You can pay for your ticket in advance or on the bus. There’s a person on the bus that goes down the aisle and collects payment from each of the passengers. As I watched her try to balance in the aisle, I realized it’s a pretty time-consuming process. While I was sitting on the bus watching her, I had an idea.
Last weekend I did a 4-mile race in Central Park and got a new PR (Personal Record). I did it in 30:29 min (so 7:38/ mile average) — I was really happy with that result. What made me even happier was that a year ago I did the same race in 33:10, I was excited to see such improvement.
This week’s photo is from the America’s Cup World Series, which was in NYC on May 7-8th. I honestly didn’t know anything about this sport, but it’s quite impressive from both an athletic and technology perspective.Continue reading
When I travel to a new place, I hate wasting time at the beginning of each day asking: “What should we do today?”. So now before I go on a trip I always try to search travel sites and blogs to find ideas before hand (shocking, I know). Then I make two lists, the “musts” and “maybes”. This ensures I always have a short list of ideas to rely on.
Is your team investing enough in user research? When was the last time you did user research … last week, last month, last year, never?
Einstein once said: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
Why should we spend more time thinking about the problem than working on the solution?
Well, the answer is quite simple. The more we understand a problem, the more obvious the solution will be.
I’m a runner and my first big race this year was going to be a marathon in May. But, I recently got an injury and have spent the last few weeks trying to figure out what’s wrong. So disappointing! And if you’re a runner, you know how torturous it is to not be able to run.
Do you know what problems you’re solving? Honestly though. Whatever project you’re working on right now, can you articulate how that project or design is solving a problem? If you can’t, then you should hit pause on everything and spend some time identifying the problem.
A few weeks ago I decided to train for another marathon. In November 2015, I ran my first marathon – the NYC marathon – and it was a great experience. I was able to do it only 15 weeks after having surgery. Crazy, I know.
When I start a new project, I immediately go into research mode. I spend hours looking at other sites, products, and apps to see if the purpose of the product is clear.