How do we know if we are truly impactful as a design team? Are we seen as a vehicle to deliver a solution that moves a needle? The business value of design has been proven at scale by the McKinsey Design Index. and the study shows the best design performers increased their revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry counterparts. It’s time to empower our design teams and give them one voice to show how and when design really adds value.
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How do you move faster when adding folks to a project supposedly slows it down? Mailchimp’s CPO takes the reader through some considerations for preserving momentum while scaling up. Software is difficult to build with lots of complex interdependencies. And everyone needs to work together to get it done. As you work to manage dependencies and introduce tools to help scale, make sure you clearly communicate the why behind the practices.
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Having a face-to-face meeting with your client can cause anxiety for those of us that push pixels for a living, but even the simplest kind of sketching can help. The sitemap meeting can be a minefield of multiple stakeholders, multi-dimensional categories, historical analytics, new products and mobile-first demands. Using a live illustration of a customer site journey, you can create a meaningful sitemap with which site visitors will resonate.
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You spend so much time focused on other people’s websites that it’s easy to put yours on the backburner and tell yourself, “I’ll fix it up someday soon.” But do you really want to wait to improve your professional portfolio site? It could be bringing you a lot more business — a lot more quality business, too — if you’d only spend some more time on it. In this article, Suzanne Scacca explains why spending that time turning it into a PWA would be worth your while.
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Every website or PWA you build should automate as much prospecting and selling as possible. The only thing is that visitors enter websites with various mindsets, depending on which part of the buying stage they’re at. This means that you can’t just take every person who enters the site through the same path. You have to design a custom sales funnel (or pathway) for each kind of buyer. In this article, Suzanna Scacca will tell you what you need to keep in mind.
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Task switching is a design killer. Find out why switching and interruptions are even more serious than you think and how biology makes it difficult to resist the temptation to just check your email every few minutes. In this article, Eric Olive will show you how to slay the distraction dragon with five practical tips for increasing focus as you tackle challenging design problems.
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Agile has had a long time to infiltrate software development. While the methodology advocates for “co-located, dedicated teams,” in its ubiquity Agile is frequently applied to teams partially or fully composed of part-time workers. While there are lessons to be taken from the practice, Agile must be adapted to support, rather than hinder, part-time teams. In this article, Philip Kiely will consider applying Agile to a team of 5-10 people each working 20 hours per week on a project.
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As a frontend developer, I want to apologize to the designers out there for all the misunderstandings that have happened in the past. I think it’s time for us developers to improve our awareness of the designers’ role and show them that we can — and should — look beyond our own screens.
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Every job comes with its own set of “things I wish I’d known before I started working here.” What kinds of questions can you ask during an interview to spot red flags before the company stabs the whole flagpole into your sacred UX heart? For this piece, veteran UX leader and author Robert Hoekman Jr looks back on 20 years in the profession to craft a counter-punch: a set of “things we should ask every company before going to work for them.”
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Think about your last few software projects. Was there a healthy balance between concrete business goals, meeting users’ needs, and shipping the product in a timely fashion? The key to striking this balance is a design process that accounts for complexity, addresses design problems early, and avoids relying too heavily on third parties. A major contributor to clunky software is flawed design processes. In this article, Eric Olive will outline four design process problems and explain how to address them.
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