There is much discussion these days on the dilution of UX and its inability to say, definitively, what the hell it is. I wade into this soup with a hypothesis: UX, in many of its permutations, are the General Managers of product. What does a General Manager actually do? To evaluate, first we need to know what…

If we, as designers, don’t fight to end the design handoff sh** show, then who will? — Project handoff is one of the most inefficient and painful steps in software development. Designers and developers both hate it. Handoff leads to a false antagonism between design and development teams. Designers fight to “be in the room”, but design handoff is a door we can’t walk through. …

With the right tools, we can close the gap between product and engineering. — “Designers shouldn’t ALSO have to code!” This is a refrain I hear a lot. Some designers feel working with code is too complex; others that it is exploitative. They are not wrong. But prototyping is a transformative practice with profound implications for design. …

And we’ve got the empirical receipts to prove it. — How often have you found yourself needing to justify the contributions of design or UX in your organization? We know our own value, but rigorous studies that demonstrate that value across disciplines are hard to find. McKinsey’s report on the business value of design brings the receipts. Their research shows…

The second half of my two-part interview on how I’ve iterated the No Handoff method — Earlier this week, I sat down with Nelson Taruc to be interviewed about the risks of project handoff and my No Handoff method. He shared his experience that “the traditional UX handoff process [is] utterly broken.” I couldnt agree more. We had so much to talk about we split the…

Prototyping is a simple (not easy) catalyst for transformative change in UX — I recently stumbled across a 2008 article from David Verba, “Sketching in code: the magic of prototyping.” In this article he shares the benefits that prototyping brought to his projects. …

Fed up with front-loading design? This is what I do instead. — First, this is not an anti-Figma post. We need many tools and processes for the many designers and design challenges out there. This is a post describing why I no longer use Figma and what process has proved more efficient for me. Figma is an ambitious—and pretty cool—piece of software…

How I used No Handoff to integrate discovery and production teams in an Agile project. — Background We are all familiar with project handoff: that universally hated period of inefficiency, disruption, and blame. Your precious work gets thrown over the fence, or you catch something that doesn't make sense and have to do it anyway. Agile disrupted the handoff between developers, leadership, and with the end user…

Is your company using UX to offload their discomfort with ambiguity? — I recently stumbled across an article about Dark Matter with this absolute gem of an opener: “In our search for cosmic signals of dark matter, we could be likened to drunkards looking for lost keys beneath lampposts, where the light shines the brightest…. What if instead we trained our sights…