design thinking Articles & Videos

  • Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking

    Empathy maps help UX teams visualize user attitudes and behaviors, building a shared understanding of end users while highlighting gaps in existing user data.

  • Design Process Isn't Dead, It’s Compressed

    As AI speeds up design work, the argument to "throw out the process" misrepresents how experienced designers work.

  • User-Ecosystem Thinking: An Anthropologic Approach to Design

    The NN/g UX Podcast featured coauthors Mike Youngblood and Ben Chesluk, who are challenging the traditional, outdated model of “users” in UX.

  • UX Strategies for Complex-Application Design

    UX in complex, specialized domains requires adapting familiar methods across the design lifecycle to address domain constraints and expert-user needs.

  • The Diverge-and-Converge Technique for UX Workshops

    By first working independently on a problem and then converging to share insights, teams can leverage the benefits of both work styles, leading to rapid data analysis, diverse ideas, and high-quality designs.

  • Affinity Diagramming for Collaboratively Sorting UX Findings and Design Ideas

    Use affinity diagramming to cluster and organize research findings or to sort design ideas in ideation workshops.

  • UX Basics: Study Guide

    Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn more about the basics of user experience.

  • Avoiding 3 Common Pitfalls of Affinity Diagramming

    Inexperienced facilitation in affinity diagramming workshops can lead to groupings that do not serve the team goals or misrepresent underlying issues.

  • Mood Boards in UX: How and Why to Use Them

    Create mood boards to collect visual inspiration, communicate brand identity, and decide on the product's visual direction.

  • When to Use Empathy Maps: 3 Options

    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.

  • How to Build a Participant List for UX Workshops

    A successful UX workshop includes a relatively small number of diverse participants and prioritizes users’ needs.

  • 5 Facilitation Principles for Both UX Workshops and User Tests

    Both UX workshops and usability tests benefit when facilitators are focused on goals, follow a meeting guide yet are open to improvisation, encourage participants to act, and don’t talk too much.

  • Design Thinking: Study Guide

    Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about design thinking.

  • UX vs. Service Design

    User experience is focused on what the end user encounters, whereas service design is focused on how that user experience is internally created.

  • Three Levels of Pain Points in Customer Experience

    Pain points are problems that occur at the different levels of the customer experience: interaction level, customer-journey level, or relationship level.

  • Using “How Might We” Questions to Ideate on the Right Problems

    Constructing how-might-we questions generates creative solutions while keeping teams focused on the right problems to solve.

  • Design Thinking: The Learner’s Journey

    As an individual learns design thinking, they go through 4 learning phases: newcomer, adopter, leader, and grandmaster.

  • When Remote Workshops Fail

    For a successful remote workshop, pick the tools with low entry cost, plan timing carefully, and create the expectation for active participation.

  • How to Run a Journey-Mapping Workshop: A Step-by-Step Case Study

    How to design a journey-mapping workshop that leads participants through current-state assumption mapping, pain-point identification, and future-state visioning.

  • Journey-Mapping Approaches: 2 Critical Decisions To Make Before You Begin

    Before beginning any journey-mapping initiative, teams must decide between (1) a current-state or future-state map, and (2) an assumption-first or research-first approach. A hybrid approach for each decision works well for most teams.