Design Process Articles & Videos

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2021: What Makes Them Great

    The 2021 Intranet Design Annual winning teams exhibited a capacity to swiftly pivot, as well as compassion and empathy for employees.

  • Design Systems 101

    A design system is a set of standards for managing design at scale, reducing redundancy and creating a shared language and visual consistency across channels.

  • Scenario Mapping: Design Ideation Using Personas

    Persona-based scenarios can be leveraged to influence design through guided brainstorming workshops called scenario-mapping workshops.

  • Applying UX Principles to the Visual Design of Graphical Artifacts: The Case of the Heuristics Posters

    We made the 10 heuristics’ posters easy to read and understand by iterating through multiple versions and improving each based on user-centered principles and methods.

  • Getting Started with Journey Mapping: 27 Tips from Practitioners

    Set yourself up for journey-mapping success by educating yourself on the basics, defining objectives, building a crossfunctional team, collaborating on the map, and optimizing your presentation.

  • Remote Design Work: Top Challenges

    Communication is the top challenge when designing remotely, according to 213 UX professionals. Receiving feedback, replicating informal conversations, and maintaining a clear direction on projects were the biggest communication concerns.

  • 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.

  • The 6 Steps to Roadmapping

    To create a roadmap, inputs are gathered and clustered into themes, then prioritized and visualized. This article covers 6 key steps to roadmapping that can be applied to any scope or industry.

  • 3 Types of Roadmaps in UX and Product Design

    Roadmaps that include UX work can have 3 scopes: product, field, and specialty. Understanding these and their benefits can focus your process, effort, and goals.

  • A Guide to Service-Blueprinting Workshops

    Service-blueprinting workshops require thoughtful planning and hands-on facilitation.

  • ResearchOps 101

    The practice of Research Operations (ResearchOps) focuses on processes and measures that support researchers in planning, conducting, and applying quality research at scale.

  • Complex Application Design: A 5-Layer Framework

    Various contexts of complexity should be considered by UX designers and researchers designing complex applications, including complexities of integration, information, intention, environment, and institution.

  • Crafting Product-Specific Design Principles to Support Better Decision Making

    Product design principles (or, in short, design principles) are value statements that frame design decisions and support consistency in decision making across teams working on the same product or service.

  • Service Blueprinting: A Digital Template

    The structure and format of a collaborative spreadsheet makes it an effective tool for virtual service blueprinting.

  • 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.

  • UX Roadmaps: Definition and Components

    A UX roadmap is a high-level, living artifact that prioritizes and communicates a UX team’s future work and problems to solve.

  • 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.

  • DesignOps Maturity: Low in Most Organizations

    In a survey of 557 design and UX practitioners, organizations only did 22% of recommended DesignOps efforts, did not have DesignOps-dedicated roles, and had low DesignOps maturity overall.

  • Journey Mapping for Remote Teams: A Digital Template

    A collaborative spreadsheet is an efficient, effective tool for virtual customer-journey mapping. Because of the format and structure it affords, almost everyone will be able to access and easily use it.