Kate Kaplan specializes in applying human-centered design and research practices to enterprise UX challenges. With over 15 years in UX, Kate has extensive experience in both conducting research and helping teams understand and apply user insights to overall business strategy.
Use a simple equation or an absolute-number approach to decide how many dots to allocate in dot-voting activities. In most cases, 3-6 dots is appropriate.
To understand the needs of work-domain experts, use retrospective testing, expert walkthroughs, and interviews instead of think-aloud usability-testing studies.
Democratization of UX work, or making it acceptable and accessible for everyone, must be accompanied by due diligence: setting guidelines, educating others, and demystifying the process.
Empathy maps can be used to plan for future research studies, capture insights during current user research, and communicate research insights from research that has already been conducted.
User journeys and user flows both describe processes users go through in order to accomplish their goals, but they differ in scope, purpose, and format.
Usability assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. Usability is defined by 5 quality components: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction.
Empathy maps are a powerful, flexible tool that can be used to plan for future research studies, capture insights during current user research, and communicate research insights from research that has already been conducted to others.
Whether UX succeeds or fails comes down to whether other people in the organization trust the UX team, the UX process, and the UX findings and designs. Low trust = poor outcomes, no matter how good the work, so building trust is a priority.
DesignOps success is difficult to track and measure. Use the REACH framework (Results, Efficiency, Ability, Clarity, Health) to identify and triangulate relevant DesignOps metrics, and use clear goals to understand the success of individual DesignOps programs.
