When you lead a design team, of any size and shape, it becomes part of your leadership responsibility to develop the talent you have. You must help your designers develop new skills, embrace new experiences as learning opportunities, and imbue a sense of progress. We must do this to push the team’s skills forward and give folks a chance to progress in their careers.

The challenges of using development frameworks

Today most teams fall back on the career development framework. This approach attempts to quantify a mixture of skills, attitudes, and behaviours against an atypical view of the ideal designer.

Anyone who has extensively used a…

What are haptics?

Haptic feedback is any physical notification/indication that can be felt by your body. The most common type of haptic response for product designers today are phone and wearable interfaces that notify users, without alerting other people. Sometimes these are used together with audio and visual responses to add an extra layer of richness to the experience. Games designers have been using haptics for many years now within controllers.

Compared to visual and audio cues, haptics are somewhat under utilised by product designers. They have a far more intimate outcome as it is an interaction with a person’s body. …

The design manager role has grown considerably over the past five years. As design has been recognised as a business value-driver and organisations have increased their design maturity, we’ve seen lots more design management roles being created. The design leadership community is now represented by Slack groups, conferences, meetups, content and books that offer support and guidance for navigating the transition from designer to leader. Through all of this material and rhetoric there is one undeniable theme:

Becoming a design manager is really hard

It’s as simple as that. This shit is really difficult.

People are struggling, stressed out, and…

When I took up my role as Head of UX at Virgin Atlantic, we didn’t have an ongoing program of optimisation and experimentation. I tackled this opportunity by putting in place the following 6 point plan.

1. Dedicated effort

Initially there was no dedicated role(s) across the department to run an optimisation effort. A few team members had built up their experience and skills in this area, but until we created a specific role it was never going to get the attention it deserved.

Creating new roles is not an easy task in an organisation that isn’t in startup mode, so I identified…

The line between great leadership and being a terrible boss is surprisingly fine. Each day you’ll find yourself walking a tightrope of nuance that spans between confidence and ignorance. Stepping in to a role as a design leader can be a tricky process, regardless of whether or not it’s a promotion, a new company or a new team.

With each role there are many traps that can easily taint your reputation. Most of which are not immediately obvious and some of which may push against your instincts.

What follows is a selection of actions and behaviours that I’ve witnessed in…

In the past few years I’ve noticed a pattern emerging. I have seen a lot of great experience design failing to see the light of day, and I have noticed that there is a behaviour and attitude amongst designers, writers and researchers that’s contributing to this problem. Many times great designers have applied insightful methodologies and executed fantastic solutions only to find stakeholders stop them in their tracks.

I first noticed this pattern of behaviour in myself and so I hope that this observation will help you recognise it and perhaps avoid my pitfalls.

The F1 analogy

Ferrari are the greatest formula one…

Stepping into the role

Preparing for day one

Shortly after accepting the role I started gathering notes on how I wanted my first 90 days to go. I had the opportunity to swap notes with Alison Austin, who was also preparing to start a new role. This coincided with the Leading Design conference, which I used as an opportunity to listen to presentations from design leaders, as well as catch up with Cap Watkins — who generously gave me time to pick his brains.

I created a stack of notes in Dropbox Paper which included my thoughts on cadence, software/hardware costs, tricks for improving UCD culture, various formation…

When compared to other design disciplines, it’s fair to say that product design is relatively immature. Over the past 25 years we (the digital design community) have grown through phases. We have gone from an embryonic notion on the fringes of other design industries to a globally recognised discipline in its own right. We have had internal crises, we’ve struggled to find our identity, but product design is finding its stride. Like a teenager letting go of their internal angst and joining mature environments, product design is now sat ‘at the table’ and is contributing to the conversation.

However, for…