Design Process Articles & Videos

  • Dot Voting: A Simple Decision-Making and Prioritizing Technique in UX

    By placing colored dots, participants in UX workshops, activities, or collaborative sessions individually vote on the importance of design ideas, features, usability findings, and anything else that requires prioritization.

  • 6 Rules for Persuasive Storytelling

    Stories build empathy and make the user needs and pain points memorable to your team. Effective stories speak the language of the audience, are rooted in data, and take advantage of compelling artifacts.

  • Sympathy vs. Empathy in UX

    The majority of UX professionals practice sympathy instead of empathy for their users.

  • Journey Mapping: 9 Frequently Asked Questions

    Journey maps are useful for building common ground in an organization, but practitioners often have questions and misunderstandings about their scope and how to create them.

  • User Need Statements: The ‘Define’ Stage in Design Thinking

    User need statements, also called problem statements or point-of-view statements, are a tool for defining and aligning on the problem you are going to solve.

  • UX Retrospectives

    Retrospectives help teams reflect on their process, identify strengths and areas to improve, and turn insights into actionable plans for better future work.

  • How to Conduct Research for Customer Journey-Mapping

    When conducting research for customer-journey maps, use qualitative methods that allow direct interaction with or observation of users, such as interviews, field studies, and diary studies.

  • Journey Mapping 101

    A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal.

  • What Is Design Thinking, Really? (What Practitioners Say)

    The majority of UX and design professionals define design thinking roughly the same, regardless of industry and experience, but there’s no agreement on the specifics.

  • UX Debt: How to Identify, Prioritize, and Resolve

    Like tech debt, UX debt piles up over time and, if left unaddressed, leads to compounding user problems and costly cleanup efforts. Agile teams can modify their processes to track and resolve UX debt.

  • Case Study: Iterative Design and Prototype Testing of the NN/g Homepage

    The NN/g homepage redesign relied on rapid iterative prototyping, and usability testing, to balance multiple design objectives.

  • A Model for Conducting UX Workshops and Exercises

    To ensure activity participants get the most out of UX activities, use a three-step process to conduct them: explain, execute, and examine.

  • Storyboards Help Visualize UX Ideas

    Storyboards are visual representations of UX stories, which capture attention, provide clarity, and inspire us to take action.

  • Using Prioritization Matrices to Inform UX Decisions

    Visuals such as charts and matrices can help practitioners base important decisions on objective, relevant criteria instead of subjective opinions.

  • In Defense of Post-its

    Sticky notes strengthen team dynamics and represent an egalitarian, concise means for expressing ideas in UX design projects.

  • UX Expert Reviews

    Expert reviews involve the analysis of a design by a UX expert with the goal of identifying usability problems and strengths.

  • The 5 Steps to Service Blueprinting

    Five key steps comprise a framework for service blueprinting that can be scaled to any scope or timeline.

  • Why Personas Fail

    Personas are useful tools for UX work, so why do they often fail? Find out what pitfalls cause personas to fail, and how to avoid and overcome them.

  • 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.

  • Decision Frames: How Cognitive Biases Affect UX Practitioners

    Designers are vulnerable to the same cognitive biases as users. The context in which you present a problem can bias your design choices.