Atlassian recently did a study to find what were the biggest distractions in the workplace. You might not be surprised to hear that culprit number two was meetings. So here’s our guide to running collaborative, productive meetings that don’t suck.
Some Hard Truths About Meetings
According to the study, on average employees go to about 60 meetings each month, with attendees saying that half of all these meetings were a waste of time. This adds up to about 31 hours of unproductive time each and every month.
Putting the numbers aside for a second, it’s not hard to imagine how someone’s energy might be sapped through sitting through countless, pointless meetings.
Even when we manage to invite the right people in the right room, Atlassian found that:
- 91% of people daydreamed during meetings
- 96% of people have straight up missed meetings
- 39% of people have…
How the wrong KPIs will lead your organisation to successfully achieving negative results.
In uncertain, complex, and ambiguous times where change is the only constant, it is easy to lose sleep to heavy-hitting questions about your business.
- Is my organisation heading for a cliff?
- Am I moving too slow and not taking on enough risk?
- Are the naysayers right and I should take their advice?
- Are the naysayers wrong and I should trust my instincts and push forward.
If you’re like most, the go-to position for fending off insomnia are your KPIs. You put our faith in data, because cold hard facts can never lead you astray.
Right?!?
The problem with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
…
Practical strategies on scaling your team so that when things take off, you’re ready.
So it’s finally happened — your company has developed a new product that people absolutely adore. With the growth of the product, you suddenly have the capacity to scale and also, a sudden demand to scale. Like, right now.
Most companies in this position jump into action, hiring rapidly and aggressively without pausing to form a strategy or consider the long term impacts of sudden growth.
But simply adding new people doesn’t immediately increase productivity or capacity. In fact, in many cases the opposite happens.
People aren’t like modular furniture, you can’t just attach new teams to meet new capacity…
The values, principals and application
How we experience, interact with and perceive technology will change more in the next ten years than it has in the previous 50 — hard to believe I know.
We are already addicted to swiping on six-inch touchscreens.
Fully immersive, reality-augmenting intelligent experiences are coming, and our monkey brains will be no match for their seduction.
Experience designers will play a pivotal role in shaping these new experiences, which means experience designers will play an essential role in shaping the human experience for the next generations.
As the design industry matures and gains influence within organisations, and as digital health…
Redesigning the job title in the age of Spotify
Many of you will remember having a physical music collection, your own tangible manifestation of your musical identity.
It wasn’t that long ago, but music streaming services have now relegated our once prized collections to our attics and glove compartments.
Our favourite songs are no longer trapped as Track 13 on a CD that was long ago scratched. We can now play it on constant loop, or place it as track number one in a playlist of our other 100 favourite songs. We can share it freely and enjoy countless remixes and covers all over YouTube and Vimeo.
The way…
A passionate team with decades of experience helping teams create products and experiences people love.
Together we’re building a model that leads to true capability uplift within organisations and help teams be responsive and resilient in complex, fast-paced environments.
We want to do this while also helping you and your teams deliver true business value and meaningful customer experiences.
Contact us and say hi ✌️
Fitting research into agile teams
At its best, UX research surfaces insights and enables progress; at its worst it just gets in the way.
There are many objections to conducting UX research, but the most common I hear is ‘We don’t have enough time.’
I can certainly sympathise with this inclination to ‘just get it done’.
With the move away from overly managed waterfall projects, to cross-functional agile teams, it can be hard to find where in the process research best fits.
You are conducting user research — whether you know it or not
As a UX designer, I have heard lots of reasons why not to conduct user research. Usually, I hear the classics, ‘we don’t have enough time’ and ‘we don’t have enough money’, but occasionally I’ll also get ‘users don’t know what they want’, or ‘you’re the UX expert — why don’t you just decide?’
…and there are so many more.
The dilemma:
As a UX designer, when you face an objection like this, what should you do?
The true answer:
Avoiding user research isn’t an option.
The more tactful answer:
Once someone outside of your development team starts using your…
A guide, not a template
The first thing a good UX Designer should tell you about creating a persona is that if you just blindly follow a template, you have missed the point. User research should inform the layout — don’t let the layout constrain the research.
Put simply, don’t just follow a template.
Sadly, this advice is not very helpful when you are starting out, staring at a blank sheet of paper trying to create a set of personas.
‘Isn’t making a persona a waste of time? What’s the point?’
Personas are all about building empathy amongst your team. Great software gets made when…
Two different concepts with maddeningly similar initials and overlapping goals.
This is a resource guide to complement the ‘Intro to UX Design’ course run by IF Academy. Visit their website for upcoming course dates.
This week builds on topics covered in Week 1 (Intro to UXD) and Week 2 (Insight to MVP) and Week 3 (Interaction design starts on paper). View the full Table of Contents.
IA = Information Architecture
AI = Artificial Intelligence
AI is personified as you — the user — asking a machine a question, and the machine understanding what you’re asking, then finding an appropriate answer. …
Ben Ralph
Start-Up Founder, Head of Product Innovation ⚡️
