What is design thinking? What do you think of when you think of design thinking?
Perhaps you imagine a plethora of post-it notes, a swirling whirlwind of inspiration like in Minority Report. Perhaps we’re snatching ideas out of the brainstorm, shuffling content and design — it’s technical, fluid, and amazing. Or maybe you’re thinking of something like Steve Jobs, sitting alone in his room on a futon. A minuscule seed of inspiration begins to form, and a single drop of genius drips down. …
Craig Johnson, senior product designer, gives us a behind the scenes look at how the UX team planned an exciting two-day online meetup. He offers tips, advice, and insight on how your team can have fun and reconnect — all while avoiding Zoom fatigue.
Gathering is critical for our UX team members since they’re all embedded into different mission teams such as Partner Tech or Customer Engagement. As a result, our UX organization might not always cross paths in their day-to-day work. Learn how Craig and his teammates color-coded a productive schedule full of meaningful team activities. …
So your Objective Key Results (OKRs) are prepped, validated by stakeholders, approved, and ready to go. Now what? Craig Johnson, senior product designer, shares the brainstorming framework his mission team, Partner Tech, uses to create, plan, and prioritize ideas that work towards their quarterly goals.
If you’ve already written out your OKRs, chances are, you’ve already started to think about ideas on how to achieve them. This team exercise will help you surface more, varying ideas. It’s an excellent opportunity to get the whole team involved and invest in the forthcoming product strategy.
What are OKRs?
OKRs are a simple framework for defining…
So you’ve done all the prep work, validated with various stakeholders, and got the green light — your quarterly OKRs are ready to go 💪…
…now what?
In this post, we’ll outline a simple workshop structure for generating initial ideas for newly written OKRs.
Objectives and key results (OKR) is a framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes. If you’ve got OKRs written, no doubt you’ve already got some ideas on how you can achieve them as well.
But this simple brainstorming exercise will not only surface more, varying ideas, it’ll also provide a great opportunity to get…
6 practical things you can do today to limit workplace distractions, and take back control of your focus & productivity.
Below are a couple of things that have helped me combat the flurry of incoming distractions each day, so I can keep on top of the important stuff.
Contents:
- Slack notifications
- Calendar ownership
- Time-sink tabs
- Keep a clean desk
- Hide the dock
- User manuals
1. Slack notifications
Straight off the bat, let’s start with the number one focus vampire — Slack 🧛🏻♀️
Slack is a great way to stay connected to your colleagues, especially when working in remote teams or in offices with multiple floors/buildings.
But, how often have you been deep in thought, and then…
Back before Spotify knew my own tastes better than I do, I would aggregate any of my new found musical discoveries into weekly (or thereabouts) playlists with about 10 songs or about an hour worth of music 🤘
I always tried to construct the playlists in a way that blended the songs together nicely or progressed the mood of the ‘set’ in a listener-friendly way.
By the time I’d reached playlist #50, I’d been making playlists for over two years, and just after I stopped putting these playlists together Spotify released it’s new, intelligent Discover Weekly playlist — an automatically…
Being calm, self-aware and ‘in the moment’ is easier to think about as a concept, in my experience, than it is to achieve.
Regular breaks, reading physical books and leaving digital devices out of the bedroom are all effective ways of disconnecting from the digital space and reconnecting with ourselves and those around us.
And mediation aids, like headspace, are doing a great job of teaching us meditation techniques, raising awareness of its benefits, and also highlighting some of the difficulties it can sometimes present.
And while all of the above things have made a somewhat positive…
tl:dr — if you want to put pineapple on your pizza, you should.
I’m not a huge fan of pineapple on pizza, mainly because it can squirt streams of molten pineapple juice into your mouth, can make everything a little too wet (which in turn affects base crispness and slice curvature), and it’s very sweet, which conflicts with other, more preferable ingredients — like gorgonzola 🧀.
That being said, I believe one of the beautiful things about pizza is its democracy. A pizza base is a world of possibilities; one’s own culinary playground if you will. Reducing that to but…
In a lot of teams I work with, when we’re working on a project, discussing the different aspects of the interface and working through all the interactions and behaviours together, we often undergo a process I like to call micro testing.
What is micro testing?
Micro testing is the practice of asking questions about the thing we’re designing. For example, we’re looking at menu items on the landing page of a website, and the navigation on its mobile counterpart. We ask questions like: “What will happen if…? What happens when I do…? How does this respond?” etc. It’s not uncommon that we’re gesturing and…
It’s Friday, and all I can think about is 🍕 pizzzzzzzzaaaaaaaaaa 🍕.
Down the Spitalfields Market end of Brick Lane, almost opposite the Bricklane Mosque, is an understated Italian restaurant, just waiting to roll out, I tell no lie, some of the best pizza I’ve had in East London to date.
At face value, La Cucina doesn’t look like your typical lunchtime takeaway. It reads more like an evening restaurant, and it is, but the trick here is, is that they also do a sweet lunchtime half price deal on most of their menu — including half price pizzas on…
