Column: Business of Design

The field of UX design is vast and expansive. It impacts every organization in the world. No business remains untouched by modern design sensibilities. As Adam Judge has said, “The alternative to good design is bad design. There is no such thing as no design.”

But what is the worth of good design to an organization? Do UX designers add value to businesses in tangible and intangible ways? Yes! Studies suggest that the ROI of UX design could be as high as 9,900%! Furthermore, according to McKinsey, companies that score in the top quartile of the McKinsey Design Index outperform industry benchmark growth by 2:1. Read More

Since the dawn of digital-product design, there have always been questions about the impacts applications and Web sites have on people’s minds. Some designers exploit dark, devious patterns to get people to waste their precious time and spend a few more seconds using an application or Web site. In fact, some big corporations optimize every small interaction to ensure maximum stickiness. In this column, I’ll consider dark patterns through the lens of User Experience and how we could apply them for good.

The inspiration behind this column was a product that I recently designed and built, whose focus was building habits of mindfulness and meditation. In that moment, I realized that patterns are dark because of the reasons for which designers use them, not because of their essential nature. If we applied the same foundational principles of behavioral psychology to something positive, we could actually help people to establish good habits. After all, hacking the toughest system of all—the human brain and nervous system—is no small feat. Doing this to help people build positive habits rather than negative ones would be a great way of gauging the role that User Experience could play in self-improvement applications. Read More

In this column, I’ll focus on designing user experiences for the Internet of Things (IoT). What is the Internet of Things? It represents a worldwide network of physical devices whose software, sensors, and other technologies enable them to connect with one another and exchange data over the Internet.

Through low-cost computing capabilities, massive data capture and storage, mobile technologies, the cloud, and data analytics, these physical devices can easily collect and share data with minimal human intervention. Digital systems are capable of monitoring, adjusting, and recording each individual interaction between connected devices. Thus, the digital world is meeting and cooperating with the physical world. Read More