Have you thought that the way brand standards are defined and upheld across departments in your organization is sub-optimal? A recent conversation pushed me to do more research on the topic. How I Started Down the Rabbit Hole I was recently talking over coffee with a new friend and, as…

Much has been said, written, tweeted, and blogged about the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Even though Eric Ries, a fellow at IDEO and the author of The Lean Startup, is usually credited with coining the popular acronym … it was actually coined by California-based SyncDev CEO Frank Robinson (no, not…

As a product designer, being a voracious reader & consumer of podcasts about design comes with the territory. As ‘mental cross-training’ I don’t solely read about building websites and software, I take in info from all areas. Print & traditional design, industrial design, architecture & the design of physical spaces…

em•pa•thy /ˈempəTHē/ noun the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. As defined, empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. You’re able to put yourself in other people’s shoes to see their point of view even if you’ve never been in that particular…

One of the trickiest phases early in my design career was working through the misconception that I am the sum of my work output. Psychology Today calls this workism, and I can attest that it hurts you both professionally and personally. Designers are especially susceptible to the pitfalls of perfectionism…

So you’ve done some initial Customer Research and it’s time to collect deeper insights. Before you get ahead of yourself, remember why you’re collecting data in the first place: everything should connect back to your business goals. Demographic Baseline demographic information could be as simple as the customer’s age, locations, how…

When I was going through Nashville Software School’s Web Development Bootcamp, when it came down to the design of our projects, the directive was “just make it look pretty if you can!”. It made sense as the focus of the program was to learn how to code but my thought…

Many product teams use user personas to define a target audience for their software, feature sets, or campaigns. The goal of a user persona is to quickly gain empathy and understanding through representing the needs of a larger group of users that you’re designing for. …

When interviewing participants in a user research study, researchers have to be mindful of how feedback is treated at all stages of the interview process. There are visible and invisible pitfalls that a researcher can succumb to when gathering input from participants, which can cause ‘bad data,’ as a result. …