The Apple iPad came out in 2010 and since then there have been many other players in the game. At the time, I thought they were pretty neat when I tried them out, but I haven’t figured out what kind of use I had for them. At the time, it would be useful for me as a reader and video player which weren’t enough for me to pull the trigger.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to try out various tablets and try to incorporate them into my daily activities to see how they fared. For the most part…

Last week I participated in a workshop over at General Assembly called “Innovation in Design Thinking”. It was a 4-hour workshop hosted by the folks at 352 Inc., and it was a pretty easy sell for me since it was local and free.

I signed up for the workshop because I was primarily interested in what “design thinking” and “innovation” meant to the host and what they were going to do to promote those ideas.

Of course, one of the things I do look forward to at any long workshop is the noms spread.

Recently, I had started a new job and aside from acclimating to the new processes, on-boarding rituals, and figuring out how to work the coffee machine, one of the more challenging tasks for me is remembering names.

Since it had been so long since I’ve started a new job, it was going to be a wild rush meeting a bunch of new people and then faced with the challenge of trying to remember everyone. I decided it was a good opportunity to experiment with something new that may help me out.

It was a simple experiment. On day one of…

That time in my life has come where I’m making a transition from one job to another. What makes this interesting is that I’m coming from a company where I had my first outing into the UX field.

To briefly summarize my career post-college thus far…

• Web Developer (4 years, 2 companies)
• Junior Visual Designer (1.5 years)
• Interaction Designer (2.5 years)
• UX Designer (2 years)

So for over six years (a majority of my post-college life), I’ve spent it with one company, learned the ropes of UX throughout that time, and now I’m embarking on my first UX job since…

This past weekend I participated in my first hackathon. To keep the journey leading up to it brief, I’ll just say in a nutshell that I discovered the event after having been active in the Code for Atlanta group for the past ~2 months during my time in finding active meetup groups to develop myself as a UX designer. In this particular hackathon, the target was focused on the problems of improving the rider experience and increasing ridership. It was a great opportunity because it would mean that there would be a higher need for specialties outside of coding.

Luckily…

Recently, I’ve been observing on Facebook the multitude of friends who have been updating their statuses to indicate that they are available for lodging for those who are looking to evacuate the South Florida area. It’s great that there are so many people offering to help prior to the arrival of Hurricane Irma. At the same time, I saw this as a potential opportunity for Facebook to enhance their “Safety Check” feature set so I took a lunch break to put some more thought into it.

The “Safety Check” is a feature where at its core, it allows individuals to…

As a UX design professional, I feel that one of the important things to do to keep me on my toes is to practice design thinking. I suppose a common metaphor for this would be physical exercise (we’ll use running). That is, at first, running is such a slog, but if you consistently exercise, over time running won’t feel as much of a slog. To expand on this metaphor, when running doesn’t feel like a slog, you can, generally speaking, do one of two things:

• Maintain the intensity
• Push the envelope (that is, get faster or run farther which means…

So, my wife and I have recently purchased our first house. It was a pretty crazy of a whirlwind of a process. A lot of anticipation, anxiety, and excitement strewn along the way. While it is fresh in my mind, I thought it’d be nice to map out a quick draft of the process.

Some things to consider

• As mentioned, there were quite a bit of emotions that surfaced throughout the process. An iteration of this diagram would definitely involve pointing out these emotions/pain points/etc.
• Excludes other steps that may happen before or in parallel to placing an offer (e.g…