It’s 2020, and the pandemic has thrown a wrench in your career plans.

You’re not alone: with nearly 50 million people in the US applying for unemployment since March, and countries worldwide breaking unemployment records, workers everywhere are looking for jobs. Could that new job also be in a new career path? Business Insider recently reported that experts say it could be a good idea to switch careers during a pandemic.

“Crisis is an opportunity,” Mory Fontanez, a purpose coach and CEO, told Business Insider. “It asks us to pause and look deeply and honestly at all the things we have been doing day in and day out without really thinking about whether…

Just like having dinner is not just eating, being a designer is not just designing. (As much as we wish it was.)

When a chef prepares a meal, they plan, collect ingredients, prepare, test, and plate their creations. Similarly, a designer must plan, prepare, test, and present their masterpieces. Just as a chef must utilize many tools besides their knives, designers can’t create with Sketch alone.

There’s a lot of work to find the problem, figure out the solution, hack away at the barriers to solving it, and get the solution out the door.

This article features a collection of…

Personas are a vital tool in the design process to humanize a user or customer. They help product teams move away from building for themselves, or worse, an anecdotal customer/nephew/friend/acquaintance of your manager.

Often a personas deliverable is underutilized: a tool for the designer that barely resonates with the rest of the team, and is quickly forgotten by stakeholders in the broader business. I have seen firsthand that this is a problem for a project.

The danger of personas getting lost in the design process is that there is no agreed-upon foundation to guide future feature and functionality decisions. …

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs (Wikipedia).

Confirmation bias is all about selectivity: selectivity in the data that you pay attention to, and how you processes that data.

This cognitive bias has gotten a lot of attention recently in terms of how we consume and share news in the world of social media. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs, which can be particularly dangerous in our current political climate. …

I’ve been officially self-employed for 6 months now, and the journey has been every bit as much of a roller coaster as many long-time pros warn about. Self-doubt about how to spend your time and energy feel as inevitable for freelancers as commuting is for employees.

I have made progress! I’ve found, won, and completed great projects. I’ve met inspiring freelancers and founders making their own path. I’ve enclosed myself in the beautiful Bondi bubble for days-on-end.

But the most satisfying wins have been completing my own creative projects.

The most recent one is my first online course. Getting Started…

You’ve been working on a startup, design, or project and know that you need some customer validation to move on to the next step. If you’ve never planned and executed a research project before, it might feel like a big task. But it doesn’t have to be!

Doing research without a plan is like grocery shopping without a list — you’ll end up with a bunch of junk food that looked good at the time, but isn’t useful as a ingredients for a recipe.

I’ve been working in UX for 10 years, the first 8 as a designer. I always…

[April 17. 6:13 pm]

Ok, welcome to the last installment of my real-time experiment, where I kickoff my freelance UX business in real time with a business strategy (part 1), a UX strategy (part 2), and now my website design.

At the end of the day yesterday, I did this first draft sketch of my site, based on the needs of the users and the goals of my business:

Pretty great right? Again, you don’t have to be a great drawer to call yourself a designer.

For some projects, I might continue on paper and sketch each page in slightly…

[Monday, April 16. 5:36 pm]

In part 1 of this post, I outlined my business purpose and goals. I called it a business strategy, because it sets the direction for my business and path to how I think I will get there.

But it doesn’t yet have a key component: the user. Who specifically are my clients? What do problems do they have, and why am I the one to solve them?

This will be the focus of today’s real-time post.

[UX vs. CX: a quick definition:

Many people, including me, use the terms User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience (CX) interchangeably. In general, if I’m…