Design Process Articles & Videos

  • A Guide to Service-Blueprinting Workshops

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

  • Complex Apps 101

    3 tips for designing applications for experts or specialized user groups doing complex domain-specific tasks (often with nonlinear workflows).

  • 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.

  • The Changing Role of the Designer: Practical Human-Centered Design

    Human-centered design has 4 principles: understand the problem, the people, and the system, and do iterative design. But what if you don't have time to do all 4 steps?

  • 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.

  • User-Centered Intranet Redesign: Set Up for Success in 11 Steps

    Before designing an intranet, appoint a leader, align with stakeholders, get user feedback, derive an intranet vision, create user-related artifacts, and assemble the right team.

  • DesignOps: What's the Point? How Practitioners Define DesignOps Value

    Practitioners define DesignOps based on the value it provides for their team or organization. Most practitioners think of DesignOps as a way to standardize and optimize processes, enable and support designers, or scale design.

  • Design Principles 101

    Design principles are value statements that guide designers in making the right tradeoff-type decisions in UX design contexts.

  • How Well Discovery Phases Are Performed in UX Projects

    Our survey results reveal that many UX practitioners perform discoveries in some shape and form, although many are on the short side, lack user research and don’t involve the right people.

  • 21st Century Design

    Traditional design education is too narrow. Don Norman advocates a broader perspective for design and designers.

  • When and Why UX Practitioners Use Service Blueprints

    We asked 97 UX practitioners how and why they use service blueprints. Here's what they said.

  • Journey Mapping: 2 Decisions to Make Before You Begin

    Customer journey maps come in two flavors: current-state and future-state mapping. Mapping can be based on hypotheses or on real user data.

  • Are You Doing Real Discoveries?

    Discoveries are a powerful part of the UX design process, but unfortunately, many teams are not doing true discovery. Here are 5 main ways to go wrong.