awesome series of articles! my suggestion for a next celebrated female designer is Tatiana Mac :)
Don Norman and decolonial design.
Back in October 2020 I had the pleasure to attend Don Norman’s Master Class transmitted by Interaction Design Foundation in which he presented the challenges to the discipline of Design and to all designers in the 21st century. To help me grasp a bit better his ideas, I also read the article he wrote with Michael W. Meyer entitled “Changing Design Education for the 21st Century”.
I want to expose in this article the main takeaways I got from Don Norman’s ideas but not without patching them with other references, which I believe it will bring more context and texture…
Research and ideation phases should become deliverables
Highlighting the value of design work is always an ongoing discussion among designers and product teams: how to measure the impact of design decisions, why idea A was chosen over idea B, why did it take so long to start implementing project C, and so on... Well, one simple way the designer can help organise this confusion is to be more transparent about the design process. And how do we do that?
We can transform design tasks that are often “hidden” on backstage into deliverables that everyone can understand. The time has come to finally open the curtains and display…
The potential of invisible design to impact business
Many organisations today, from startups to governments, are investing in customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) for their success, bringing more human-centred design capabilities to increase the business relevance of their projects for clients. And this is happening thanks to a growing number of organisations struggling to meet customers’ expectations and delivering a consistent quality of service across different channels, affirms Marzia Aricò in this article.
“Design is trending in business. …
User Experience writing is more than content design. It’s content strategy for products.
“As a writer who stumbled into UX one day many years ago, I was understandably excited; finally, organizations are realizing that copywriting shouldn’t only land on the marketing team’s desk” — UX Booth
I’ve been spending the past few months curious about this emerging role of UX writer because I always liked to write and, as a UX Designer, I was wondering how I could do copywriting for products that could really impact user experience. …
A few months ago I posted an article about a 2-day Design Sprint. In this event, our Sprint team successfully achieved to establish the long and short term goals for the project, finishing the last session with a tangible storyboard for our main user journey.
After this Sprint session, the prototype was built within a few weeks time to be tested and implemented. But, instead of rolling-out the solution to beta testers, we decided to iterate a little bit more with internal customer success managers in order to validate our hypotheses. …
Onboarding is the process of helping new users understand and experience how your product is going to help them achieve their goal.
Jory MacKay asserts that onboarding is all about proving to your users that your product is the solution to the problem they are looking for. That’s why they found you in the first place, right? But if you can’t do that quickly, users are going to leave. And how to avoid that?
Tell a story.
Every killer onboarding starts with a story.
Focus on the problem framing. Leave the prototype and test phases for later (if you really HAVE to).
Design Sprint is a process of framing the right problem, generating tangible solutions, prototyping and testing them with real users in a period of 5 intense days of work. But for our new project at AB Tasty we only had 2 days available to gather the sprint team in a room — and we did it! 💪🏽
As the original definition goes,
“Design Sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers”
This process became notorious within the Design community back in 2014 when Jake Knapp, from Google Ventures, introduced it…
If your solutions are not good enough, maybe you’re just focusing on the wrong problems
I wrote an article earlier this year on how Design Thinking methodology can help you create and validate your design hypothesis within your product team. In summary, the process of generating and testing good design propositions relies heavily on the problem space: how well you know your audience and how clear are the pain points and main blockers your users are facing on their way towards small and big successes. This means that the solution to a problem depends on how we frame the problem.
The Problem / Solution spaces
A quick guide on how to materialize your design ideas
I believe most of you are familiar with the Design Thinking methodology (if not, you can easily Google it). However, there is a common misconception that design thinking is new. No. Throughout history, good designers have applied a human-centric creative process to build meaningful and effective solutions. But in order for this approach to be adopted across large organizations, it needed to be standardized as a formal framework. So Design Thinking was born as a methodology of applying the creative design process to traditional business problems.
According to the Nielsen Norman Group, the Design Thinking framework follows an overall flow…
Bettina D'ávila
Designer, drummer & beer lover. Senior Product Designer based in Paris. Find me at bdavila.me
