Empathy is the tool that we use to gain understanding. Understanding leads to insights. Insight is what informs experiments. Experimentation results in innovation. Empathy is the experience of understanding another person’s thoughts, feelings, and condition from their point of view, rather than from your own. You try to imagine yourself in their place in order to understand what … Read more
As previously discussed, Design Thinking means thinking like a designer. It is not so much a process but a mindset. There is a process that designers follow… in the simplest of terms, it is research, design and test. Designers do have a bias to designing. They want to create elegant solutions that make peoples’ lives … Read more
One question I consistently get is “Are all Designers like this?” This is usually in the context of the challenge to management them. The answer is, “only the good ones.” The Designer’s job is to make things better… better for the people that experience what they design. To do this well, they must be adept … Read more
A mission statement is a written declaration of an organization’s core purpose. Properly crafted mission statements: serve as filters to separate what is important from what is not clearly state which markets will be served and how communicate a sense of intended direction to the entire organization A mission is different from a vision – … Read more
Over the years, I have developed my share of Design vision, missions, goals and strategies. Early in my career, I developed the teams from scratch but now it is more about helping existing teams level up. At the core of any good team, is a clearly understood vision. As I have stated many times over … Read more
This article first appeared in LinkedIn November 14, 2017. Written by one of my heroes, Tim Brown, CEO at IDEO: Some of today’s most successful companies—Airbnb, Nike—have CEOs who are also designers. And leading organizations across industries, like Apple, 3M, and Pepsi, have highly influential Chief Design Officers at the helm. Making design a priority isn’t just … Read more
Every day, we fill out forms. At the office to get our work done and at home to take care of our domestic needs. Forms are the lifeblood of digital information sharing. A couple of excellent guidelines on forms: Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design Best Practices shares guidelines on input fields, input labels, validation, feedback, … Read more
The best product development experiences I have had have been when the Product, Design and Development work together. One experience that comes to mind, is when the Product Manager, Development Manager and myself were working on a solution for a new market. We visited our main prospect, the largest organization in this market, with a … Read more
Mark Weiser gave us the concepts of ubiquitous and invisible computing. Ubiquitous – available to us anytime and everywhere – and Invisible – we don’t see it and it doesn’t get in our way of completing our task at hand. Nowadays, we expect our mobile phones, wearables, home systems, etc… to be ubiquitous and invisible – … Read more
Last week was the 5th annual San Diego Startup Week. I had the honor of speaking on UX and Agile at Moniker Warehouse and participating on a panel discussion on Creativity. My talk on UX and Agile was based on my new book, Easy to Use 2.0, and was well attended. The panel on … Read more
Dieter Rams’s early awards for carpentry led to him training as an architect as Germany was rebuilt in the early 1950s. Rams joined Braun in 1955, where he quickly became involved in product design – famously adding the clear perspex lid to the SK4 phonogram in 1956. He was appointed head of design at Braun … Read more
In the Fast Company post, Ideo Says The Future Of Design Is Circular, Adele Peter shares that Designers are now considering the entire system and design products with materials that can be used in closed loops. The Circular Design Guide, a new tool from IDEO and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, an organization that works with … Read more