Think about your last few software projects. Was there a healthy balance between concrete business goals, meeting users’ needs, and shipping the product in a timely fashion? The key to striking this balance is a design process that accounts for complexity, addresses design problems early, and avoids relying too heavily on third parties. A major contributor to clunky software is flawed design processes. In this article, Eric Olive will outline four design process problems and explain how to address them.
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The distributed team structure is known to offer many benefits for a company and its employees; however, this sort of work model also comes with its own unique set of obstacles. In 2018, Owl Labs found that 56% of the participating companies in their study adopted or allowed for some form of remote arrangement for its employees. While this organizational approach has revolutionized the way we perform our job functions, it’s also paved the way for new patterns to emerge in the way we interact with each other across the distance. In this article, Randy Tolentino will review how “remote soft-skills” can help with the challenge of building authentic connections with your distributed co-workers.
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When customers interact with your brand, they’re not aware of what’s going on backstage, and there is no reason they should. All they perceive is the play you’re presenting, the story you’re sharing, and the solution it represents for them. There is only one brand experience. At the end of the day, customers are not tasting individual ingredientz, they’re eating the entire meal. At once. In sit-downs that keep getting shorter. When the individual actors go off script, as great as they might sound solo, the brand experience breaks.
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Take a moment to remember the last time you collaborated in a code review. Did your team overcome feedback resistance and manage time expectations? Fostering a healthy mindset is the key to build trust and sharing knowledge with your colleagues. In this article, Sandrina Pereira will share how this outcome can be changed by changing your mindset during a code review as a team, as an author and as a reviewer.
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The web is wonderfully diverse and unpredictable because of wonderfully diverse people shaping it. In this new series of short interviews, we talk to interesting people doing interesting work in our industry and sharing what they’ve learned. Today, Vitaly Friedman talks to Brad Frost, author of the book Atomic Design that introduces a methodology to create and maintain effective design systems.
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Involving other people early on — especially people from other disciplines — can feel scary. By taking inspiration from code reviews, we can improve collaboration both within our own fields as well as across disciplines, be it design, UX, content or development. No one is really promoting waterfall processes anymore. So how can you involve people early on so that you’re avoiding the waterfall, but also making sure that you’re not setting yourself up for design by committee? Ida Aalen found her answer when learning about code reviews.
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Design’s role in companies is becoming less about visual appeal and more about hitting business goals and creating value for users. Therefore, the need to build teams with diverse perspectives is becoming imperative. This article is for people who are part of a design team (or any team) that makes crucial business decisions with stakeholders and how they might go about building a diverse team through the use of the Competing Values Framework evaluation.
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Creating a team who can work well together across different disciplines can be hard. Given the wide range of skills held by the line-up at the upcoming SmashingConf Toronto, Rachel Andrew solicits some suggestions from the speakers. She’s wrapped those up with her own experience of 20 years working alongside designers and other developers.
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What does it take to be a great UX leader? Well, not only do you need to provide clear guidance, but also empower different individuals in your team. A UX leader needs to encompass a wide range of skills. In his final article in this series on user experience design, Christopher Murphy will explore the different characteristics of an effective UX leader, and provide some practical advice about growing into a leadership role.
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As the spotlight has focused on the potential of design to transform businesses, we’ve seen a growing need for designers across a wider range of specializations. The number and types of roles have increased and, as UX continues to become a sought-after business differentiator, these roles will continue to diversify. What do you look out for when hiring team members? In this article, Christopher Murphy outlines how to go about building a UX team, which attributes to look out for when hiring, and he will suggest some avenues you can explore to find team members.
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