Process: Envisioning

Whenever a client or team comes to you for help designing anything specific—such as an app—your first question should be: Why an app? Or: Why whatever else they think they need?

UX design should always start with gathering information, understanding users’ needs, and establishing measurable objectives. Just adding design to someone else’s idea or cleaning up what development has created is not a recipe for success. Our job titles communicate our focus on users. But there’s still much pressure from businesses to go faster, and many believe we can just pull ideas out of our heads or quickly clean up turn-key vendor solutions and create something that’s good enough.

We need to start projects by focusing on the experience and push project teams to question the entire product ecosystem and set aside their assumptions so we can organically discover what we really should build and how. One effective approach to doing this is conducting design workshops. Read More

This is an excerpt from Chapter 9 of Chris Risdon and Patrick Quattlebaum’s new book Orchestrating Experiences: Collaborative Design for Complexity. 2018, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 9: Crafting a Tangible Vision

When you work in a small business, such as a startup, you can get everyone to play off the same sheet of music more easily. The larger your organization, however, the greater the challenge of understanding the end-to-end experiences you want to enable and why. Hierarchy, functional silos, and distributed teams create communication and collaboration barriers. Strategy is distributed in slides with terse bullet points that get interpreted in multiple ways. The vision for the end-to-end experience is lost in a sea of business objectives, channel priorities, and operational requirements. The result: painful dissonance when the dream was a beautifully orchestrated experience.

This chapter is about working with others to craft a tangible vision for your product or service—a North Star. These approaches will help your organization embrace a shared destiny and collaboratively create the conditions for better end-to-end experiences. Read More

This is an excerpt from Mona Patel’s new book, Reframe: Shift the Way You Work, Innovate, and Think. 2015 Lioncrest Publishing.

Excerpt from Chapter 7: The Reframework: Just Do WIT

Why isn’t innovation happening? Why does your business have user experience issues? Why aren’t customers in love with your brand? I believe it is because the people on your team, including you, are preventing it from happening. The problems are poorly defined.

People have closed, biased perspectives and are not seeing the problem or opportunity space clearly. There’s not enough time spent and respect given to exploration, ideation, creativity, and the harder parts of the design process including evaluating, refining, and even failing.

This all changes with reframing. Designing a new frame around the same circumstances allows new perspectives and ideas to emerge. Constantly seeing things with a new frame allows all problems to feel solvable and become opportunities for creative problem solving. Read More