Articles

Evan Sunwall

Evan Sunwall is the Director of Self-Paced Training  with Nielsen Norman Group. A former software developer, he enjoys helping users accomplish complex tasks, tackling the challenges of enterprise-level application design, and exploring effective management practices for design teams. 

Articles and Videos

  • Why You Need UX Mentoring

    Mentoring provides vocational support, psychological support, and role modeling, all of which can be particularly important in UX where many new professionals are on their own or have insufficient career support.

  • Hiring and Retaining UX Teams During the Great Resignation

    A survey of 676 UX professionals explores how well their UX teams are selecting new team members while trying to retain the ones they have.

  • Ink Thinking Improves UX-Decision Making

    Ink thinking is a method of journaling your decisions and their subsequent outcomes to reveal patterns in your intuitive decision making.

  • The C's of Great UX Mentorship

    Both mentors and mentees need to put effort into the relationship: here are 3 traits for each side, plus 2 more that both should share.

  • Improving Your Decision-Making With Journaling

    Keep a journal to document the decisions in your UX work, and once the outcome is known, return to your journal to reflect on how to improve next time.

  • Hiring Interviews Are Terrible: Smart UX Teams Structure Them

    Unstructured hiring interviews are ineffective. Smart UX teams use structured interviewing to evaluate job applicants with more accuracy and less bias.

  • Prioritize UX Findings by Severity

    When reporting design issues after usability studies or heuristic evaluation, assign severity ratings based on a small set of criteria.

  • Recognize Strategic Opportunities with Long-Tail Data

    Be a strategic thinker by recognizing opportunities at scale with seemingly small and insignificant data.

  • Prioritize Quantitative Data with the Pareto Principle

    Prioritize the 20% of your website or app responsible for 80% of a critical metric to generate substantial improvements for less effort.