Articles

Kate Kaplan

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.

@katewkaplan

Articles and Videos

  • How Practitioners Create Journey Maps: Typical Uses, Roles, and Methods

    Data from 343 companies provide a baseline to understanding typical approaches for selecting journey-mapping applications, research methods, contributing roles, and map components.

  • How Much Time Does It Take to Create a Journey Map?

    Data from 343 respondents provide a baseline to help teams understand and estimate the time and cost involved in the journey-mapping process.

  • Where Should DesignOps Focus?

    What's most useful in building a DesignOps program depends on the level of maturity in the specific organization. In the beginning, focus on pain points. Later, focus on building scale.

  • Remote Contextual Inquiry: Lessons Learned

    Contextual inquiry can be conducted remotely for certain types of tasks, provided that your participants can share most of their work setting through a video-call platform.

  • Should DesignOps Be a Dedicated Role?

    DesignOps can be a dedicated role or a shared responsibility. Regardless of approach, make sure to benchmark and track related initiatives over time to continue securing buy-in for DesignOps efforts.

  • Hostile Patterns in Error Messages

    Premature error messages, aggressively styled fields, and unnecessarily disruptive system-status messages feel bad-mannered and increase cognitive load for users during otherwise simple tasks.

  • Empty States in Application Design: 3 Guidelines

    Well-designed empty states in applications can help increase user confidence, improve system learnability, and help users get started with key tasks quickly.

  • Personas: Study Guide

    Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about personas and how to create and apply them.

  • Who Does DesignOps? Common DesignOps Roles and Partnerships

    Many roles can contribute to DesignOps at an organization. Organization- and design-team structures play a large role in determining who should take on DesignOps responsibilities.

  • Dot Coding: An Activity to Elicit Perspectives in UX Workshops

    By placing colored dots on items, participants in UX workshops or group sessions can manage the collaborative discussion of research findings, design ideas, goals, or anything else.