Design Process Articles & Videos

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2022: What Makes Them Great

    The 2022 Intranet Design Annual winning teams were small relative to the size of their organizations, yet they produced excellent designs quickly. Teams continued to partner with outside consultants for support in development, project management, design, research, and other areas. A wide variety of industries from only four countries were represented this year.

  • Design Thinking Activities

    The 6 stages of the design thinking process can be supported by a very wide range of UX methods and activities. Don't limit yourself to the most commonly mentioned methods.

  • Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in UX

    Define objectives and measurable key results to guide and track UX work. Use OKRs as a tool to align your team, provide focus, and a tangible way to monitor progress.

  • Outcomes Over Outputs

    Teams often fall into the trap of focusing on outputs (features, deliverables, and artifacts). Instead, a mindset shift of working toward purposeful outcomes (problems solved, needs addressed, and real benefits) leads to better results.

  • Setting UX Roles and Responsibilities in Product Development: The RACI Template

    Use a flexible responsibility-assignment matrix to clarify UX roles and responsibilities, anticipate team collaboration points, and maintain productivity in product development.

  • UX Roadmap Themes

    Instead of feature-focused roadmaps, theme-based UX roadmaps visualize experience strategy by communicating high-level opportunities and problems to solve. Include these 7 elements in each theme on the roadmap.

  • You Can't Impose Joy (UX Slogan #3)

    Some UX designers (and many clients) aim to "jazz up" the design to supposedly engage users. This usually backfires because extraneous design elements get in the way of users' tasks.

  • UX Roadmaps: Who, When, and How Much Time?

    While roadmaps differ in scope, their main benefit is building alignment. We address some of the common questions asked about the topic by practitioners.

  • User Story Mapping 101

    User story maps visualize the activities, steps, and details users go through in a product or feature. Instead of heavy requirements documents, story maps communicate how the pieces fit together before design and development.

  • Design Thinking: Top 3 Challenges and Solutions

    How to overcome 3 common challenges with design thinking: my team isn't interested, I have no time, I don't know where to start.

  • You ≠ User (UX Slogan #1)

    The foundation of user experience is the difference between the people on the design team and the people using the product. You can't ask users to design, but you also can't ask the designers whether their own design will be easy for the target audience to use.

  • Responding to Unhelpful Design Feedback

    In UX design meetings, critiques are sometimes based on hypothetical scenarios and pseudoevidence: not actual user problems, but something that *might* happen.

  • Service Design: Study Guide

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

  • Why Map in Discovery: 3 Mapping Methods

    In the discovery phase of a UX project, mapping provides a high-level view of the problem space and makes opportunities obvious. Maps ensure buy-in and alignment around discovery findings.

  • The Design Tool Does Not Make the Designer

    There are many design tools, and new ones come out all the time. Finding a single tool to do the job is not likely, so focus instead on understanding core design principles and adapting your process to best fit a particular task.

  • What Are Contextual Inquiries?

    Contextual inquiry is a user research method that is helpful to define requirements, improve processes, learn what's important to users, and spark ideas for future projects.

  • How to Practice Empathy

    Understanding and sharing the needs and motivations of users will lead to better design decisions. Observational research should be nonjudgmental while keeping an open mind and reducing bias.

  • User Research for Nonexistent Products

    If your product doesn't exist yet, and you don't even have a prototype, you can (and should) still base design decisions on user research. Observational research methods can gather information about user needs and provide input to new-product ideation.

  • Paper Prototyping: A Cutout Kit

    Easily (and cheaply) test early designs with this paper-prototyping kit.

  • Discovery Mapping Methods

    Mapping can help UX practitioners synthesize insight into one place and visualize the problem space. This video covers 3 maps that are often utilized during the discovery phase of a UX design project: ecosystem maps, experience maps, and process maps.