When a group wants to generate ideas, you assemble, spell out the basic ground rules for brainstorming and then have people yell out ideas one at a time. It’s a method chosen for ideation, but it is fraught with problems. Brainwriting is an easy alternative or a complement to face-to-face brainstorming, and it often yields more ideas in less time than traditional group brainstorming. In this article Chauncey Wilson will talk about this method!
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Veterans in this industry should mentor new team members and share with them the knowledge that they know they will need to succeed. This article is a follow-up “Lessons Learned in Leading New Web Professionals.” This one looks at the other side of the team leader-new employee dynamic. We’ll cover the practices that Jeremy Girard has found are consistently followed by employees who excel in their new role and grow in this industry.
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Jeremy Girard has had the opportunity to lead various Web design and development teams, including a number of professionals fresh out of school. Along the way, he learned some valuable lessons. So, he decided to make a list of some of those lessons, as a way to remind himself of what he needed to do to make sure his designers had the resources needed to succeed. Many of these lessons were actually common sense, and these common-sense lessons are exactly the ones that are easy to neglect and that we often need to be reminded of.
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Things such as group brainstorming, on-the-fly presentations and open workspaces have become the norm in most design agencies. But the stereotypical extrovert is just one of the personalities that make up a successful team. A lot of people who excel at and are passionate about design are actually introverts. So, how can we better balance our teams and elevate extroverts and introverts alike? As introverted UX designers ourselves, we’ve been unsurprisingly passionate about finding answers to this conundrum.
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We all make mistakes. Whether in our design and development work or just in life in general, we all do it. Thankfully, even the biggest mistakes carry valuable lessons. In this article, Jeremy Girard will share stories of some of the missteps he had made in the course of his career and the lessons he’d learned in the process.
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Every app tells a story. Deciding on the story for your app requires careful thought and creativity. Most stories have a lesson, and indeed most apps do, too. For any app developer, conveying an app’s story at launch is critical. And just as important as promoting the story of your app is developing a story around the app that promotes the app’s story and that differentiates the app from its competitors. To that end, what follows is a story about storytelling for a storybook app!
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Tone of voice isn’t what we say but how we say it. Robert Mills shares some cases and tips about how to find the right tone for your project or brand. Stand out from competitors and create a consistent user experience.
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Poor communication is a surefire way to damage any project or relationship, but when I dug deeper into this particular case, I realized that lack of communication was not the issue; the company provided regular updates on projects and milestones and so on. Rather, it was the words they used when giving those updates and answering questions. The problem was that the provider spoke “Web speak” and nothing else.
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Many dismiss copywriting as something that ad agency people do. Truthfully, all of us need to pay close attention to copywriting if we want to achieve our business objectives.
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We often hear companies, including Web agencies, boast about how they provide exceptional client service. But how do they define exceptional? Consider this scenario. You are hired to design and develop a new website for a retail client. The client loves the design, and the pages you develop use the latest in HTML5, CSS3 and responsive design, resulting in a website that works wonderfully across browsers and devices.
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