Does your team use personas? Do they feel real? Does it bother you when one hasn’t been thought of?
If you had to answer no to any of these questions, then you and your product team probably aren’t oriented correctly around your personas and therefore your user base. That could lead to everything from miscommunication, missed opportunities, and at worse a deaf application completely disconnected to the users you may think you’re serving.
Here’s an idea of how to solve for this and even get a perhaps less than enthusiastic persona culture to actually birth and bond with the personas themselves.
Leveraging Bias
For this to work, we’re going to be leveraging a very important psychological phenomenon often called the Ikea Bias. You may feel a lot of ownership around your research and want to direct and correct people to come to your conclusions. But unless your peers come…
I’ve recently switched to Notion and I need to rave about how just setting this up has already changed the game. I can organize and keep consistency, all while making my data overall more actionable! This is how I’m doing it.
The Real Magic
I’ve used Google’s Sheets, AirTable, Evernote and have even had the blessing of a data scientist at my disposal for capturing data. Each proved to have some usefulness, but at best, it was a storage tool. After finding my lengthy research, each of these tools left it on me to sift through, sort and report back all of my findings. It gave me another step in the process I didn’t need and helped proved the ever-popular point of “we don’t have time to research”.
Enter Notion. The real magic in putting all your findings in Notion is the ability to…
Why you should hire me
Hiring contractors remotely comes with many benefits. Aside from the obvious budget reducers like salary, healthcare and not having to supply tools, us UX Designers are particularly skilled in giving you more superpowers when hired contractually and remotely. Here are a few.
The crazy train and inevitable fate of most digital products
Not long ago, I had a dream job of leading product at a little company called Code School. They were a smart bunch I hardly had the right to hang with, constantly impressing me with both talent and wit. By the time I started, the company had already been acquired by Pluralsight, a leading on-demand professional skills trainer. While on-boarding, I was told to “Be careful about joining companies after they’ve been acquired" by the CEO himself, Gregg Pollack, in his Founder’s Talk . “Sometimes there are layoffs, sometimes they make people move, sometimes the thought leadership leaves the company…”…
Is accreditation the answer to public concern and my hiring potential?
The good news is I’m not alone. In my current state of jumping through hoop after hoop of fiery UX ambiguity for three months now, I’ve learned that there is no standards of practices, accreditations or even sound expectations from my potential clients. With the amount of time I’ve spent doing this, I should say I’m very particular with the type of jobs and clientele I want. The plug not entirely accidental here, I want a remote UX Researcher or Product Management position at a company with a smart, collaborative and remote team that’s building something I believe in. As…
If you’re the new UX Designer at a large enterprise level company that’s very much marketing and sales driven, how do you start shifting the conversation of the entire company to focus around product? It’s cultural, isn’t it? And then, is it possible to change something as big as culture at a low-level non-managerial position?
If something like this has ever ran through your conscience laced with frustration, I have it under good authority that you are not alone. UX/Product Design/HCD is such a new field it doesn’t even have a solidified name yet. Yet we ask companies to trust it’s practices and methodologies we’ve really only read about and hope they trust us enough to pass the ball. Sadly, I’ve never been passed the metaphoric product ball and my frustration has since turned to questioning. Having had so many features and projects foiled against a broken system, processes and bureaucracies I’ve since become curious…
When you set out to work on a project, depending on the scope, it could be months until it’s ready to launch. So how can you make sure you’re setting it up for success? For one, a variety of skill sets need to be covered by your team. Then, the cashflow and business viability of a project should be determined. Finally, with a project’s success, the ability to support its growth needs to be in place.
This is where some companies can fail, according to Fast Company, who cited these as some of the most common startup pitfalls — in…
Visit codeschool.com often? You may have noticed something a little different — our new homepage has launched! And though it’s true that research can’t take credit for the impressive, full-width video feature, or the new illustration style, I’m here to tell you that much was tested and analyzed to get the final product you see before you.
The First UX Project
Here at Code School, I’m honored to be part of a new team of designers focused entirely on the user experience of our product. I like to think of us as the liaison between you, our students, and the Code School team. …
Let’s say you’re thinking of starting a hover-craft share company. You’ve established your town’s hover-craft sharing potential but you’re less sure where the revenue model lies. Perhaps, instead, you’re already running a hover-craft share business that’s failed to generate revenue in a healthy matter and decide it’s time to investigate why. In either scenario, you’re next step is doing some research. You can read about research techniques in other articles. This article is focused on what happens after the research is done.
So now you’ve just come back from a huge data collection spree. You’ve collected everything there is to…
orangedrum
Remote UX Research, Product Manager available for hire.
