Business: Innovation

Recently, I have been noticing experience designers’ unique balance of soft skills such as communication, creativity, and empathy—in addition to the hard skills they’ve attained in an industry that requires a high level of understanding of new and emerging technologies. At the UX STRAT 2015 conference in Athens, Georgia, I attended some insightful talks and workshops and met a crowd full of people who had all of these things in common.

I’ve also noticed that experience designers are inquisitive and have a natural tendency to ask Why?—every time. It is this non-negotiable level of inquisitiveness that gives experience designers a fierceness that makes them unafraid of remaining in uncertainty and ambiguity when others around them are rushing to cling to the comfort of a ready solution. They trust their own design process, which enables them to lead teams to a solution that is driven by the user’s experience. Experience designers are also brave enough to try new things, and they seem to evolve and learn constantly. Read More

This is Part 2 of a sample chapter from the book UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products That People Want, by Jaime Levy, which O’Reilly Media published in May 2015. UXmatters is republishing this chapter with Jaime Levy’s permission. Copyright © 2015 Jaime Levy. All rights reserved.

Chapter 2: The Four Tenets of UX Strategy, Part 2

Editor’s Note—We published Part 1 of “Chapter 2: The Four Tenets of UX Strategy,” from UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products That People Want, in the January 2016 edition of UXmatters. If you missed it, give it a read now.

Tenet 2: Value Innovation

As digital product inventors, we must be hyperaware of all the changing digital market dynamics. We must understand how and why people use their digital devices and what defines a successful and failed UX. This is because a user’s first contact with the interface generally determines success or failure. It provides the user with their first impression of your value innovation, and it is value innovation that disrupts or creates new mental models for people. We definitely want to do that. Read More

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts discusses two topics:

• how to encourage innovation and creativity within organizations
• when and how to define the scope of a consulting project

While innovation is something that many companies would like to achieve, most long-established companies fail to innovate. How can organizations foster innovation and creativity? In this column, our expert panel first describes various ways to encourage innovation and creativity within an organization. They also consider these philosophical questions: why should organizations foster innovation and creativity and what do they gain by doing so?

Our expert panel then discusses the importance of consultants’ defining the scope of their projects to ensure that they get paid for all their work. They describe the approaches that they take to project scoping. Read More