The time, effort and money invested in designing better user experiences, more beautiful branding, and innovative advertising creates stronger, successful companies. Designers can become founders by implementing the three key simple phases of ideation, validation and iteration. Yes, there are other factors to making this process successful. However, the path should start with designers. Regardless of space, time and budget, the future of design founderism can be better realized with disruptive educational practices and open source collaboration, which nurtures more innovative designers and, in turn, results in more innovative companies.
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There are many options for a designer to consider. Hopefully, after seeing Dr. Moore and Dr. Chen’s research applied to some modern examples, as well as some insights into what other businesses are doing, you will have enough juice to power your social proof. We can learn so much from the subject of reviews, especially now that experience design is emerging and becoming a force of its own. Through its ethos of bettering customer experiences, we can start to deliver experiences that make people smile. These happy users may then tell everyone else about those positive experiences. And when people talk about you or your products, listen carefully and manage those reviews to your advantage — from start to finish.
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Every web professional is different. Practices such as turning off email at key times during the day to avoid distractions, taking weekend and vacation time for himself and avoiding filling that time with more work, or attending to professional conferences to keep the passion for web design going, worked wonders for Jeremy Girard’s own productivity. Like many web professionals, his first instinct was to work longer hours – to come into the office early, stay late, and to give up some of his own weekend time. While this certainly helped him get more work done, he quickly realized it was not something he could sustain without eventually burning out.
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Validate your fundamental assumptions as early as possible, building a minimum viable product. If the minimum viable product does not work as it should, don’t blame it. Treat the cause, not the symptom. Do customer development before you start. Don’t aim to revolutionize something. Aim to make something better. Don’t start building before you have a clear understanding of your customers. In this article, Yaakov Karda will share a few insights, mistakes and lessons learned, so you know what to watch out for in your projects.
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Technologies should never hold you back, and this book is nothing short of a strategic guide on how to use them efficiently to build flexible, scalable responsive systems today. Dive deep into how to actually apply mobile first to a design workflow, learn about the multi-column layout and how you can use it today, move towards designing atoms and elements first, and learn how to establish style guides, and much more! The brand new Hardboiled Web Design by Andrew Clarke is a book you deserve to have on your desk.
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Because digital products and services play an increasingly important role in the day-to-day operations of normal businesses, it no longer makes strategic sense to outsource these activities wholesale. As a result, we’re seeing companies move away from the old way of engaging with agencies and towards something much more collaborative. Working as part of an integrated team helps to prevent projects from being thrown over the fence, breaking the three-to-five-year cycle of redesign and stagnation. However, finding and retaining digital talent is still a major problem, and only getting worse. Here are seven simple techniques that traditional companies can adopt to help them find the talent they need to thrive in today’s digital marketplace.
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Jay Kaufmann has written job listings for many organizations over the years and for all manner of user experience roles. When he wrote his first job description, he took other listings from his company as a base, looked around for some examples from other companies and ended up with what he sees in hindsight as being the usual run-of-the-mill hodgepodge of bullet points. Presented with this today, Jay would throw out more than half the content in order to focus on what’s relevant and unique. In this article, he’d like to share some tried and true techniques for advertising your UX opening.
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Building persuasive user experiences is like a relationship and you need to treat it like one. So, what do you want? A one-night stand or a lasting partnership? There are three common challenges when engaging users with a product: Sign-up challenge: seducing your users, first-time use challenge: falling in love with your product, and ongoing engagement challenge: staying in love. Your approach to engaging users should be appropriately adjusted to the relationship you have with them. We will examine the three stages of a user relationship and what tools are appropriate to use for each challenge. This article is a summary of Anders’ talk on designing with persuasive patterns at the Push Conference 2015.
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How do you maintain that momentum and ensure that your app keeps gaining in popularity? In this article, Ryan Bateman covers some practical approaches to keeping users interested in and using your app, including talking to your users, keep on launching features, making the first impression count and using all functionalities of the operating system. The following tips are all long-term approaches to maximizing user retention, driving daily usage and getting users hooked on your app, but they don’t have to be deployed simultaneously. Your general aim, and best approach, should simply be to demonstrate that you know and care about your users’ needs and requests.
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There is no such thing as a project that goes off well without some level of planning. You’re just not the one doing it. You can keep complaining, or you can change it. You’re a designer, which means you’re capable of imagining a better version of the world than the one you’re living in. And yet there you are, stuck at the back. In this article, Robert Hoekman Jr. will share some of the reasons it happens. And how to stop being an afterthought.
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