Personal reflection enables us to process and make meaning of all of the great (and not so great) learning and working experiences we’ve had. Everyone stands to gain from engaging in some type of reflection. We can also encourage others to grow through personal reflection. I’ll cover some of the benefits of personal reflection, as well as methods of reflecting that you can incorporate into your routine.
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We should always look for opportunities to grow and improve. Retrospectives and reflections allow you to codify what you’ve learned from experience, to document mistakes and avoid future ones, and to increase your potential to grow in the future.
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How do you keep a team engaged? How do you make sure the team gets up to date with everything that’s being released? How often do the team members talk to each other face to face? Do they have enough support to finish their tasks or to pursue their growth?
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We have all been there. That dreaded moment when after weeks of work we have to present our progress to key stakeholders, and they mercilessly tear it apart. It feels inevitable, but usually, we can avoid these situations.
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As with any type of soft skills, becoming a better facilitator eventually comes down to how much experience and practice you get. Most importantly, facilitation leads to better user experiences.
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Human interactions are incredibly fascinating if you take a close look at them — the social awkwardness, the communication styles, the way knowledge is transferred, the way stories are told and trust is built. But what happens when a machine evokes the same response?
Conversational interfaces have become the new hotness in UX design. Google is about to release a new virtual assistant chatbot; Facebook has already launched the updated Messenger platform with chatbots; and Microsoft went as far as to claim that the operating system of the future isn’t Windows, but “conversation as a platform.”
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Chatbot fever has infected Silicon Valley. The leaders of virtually every tech giant — including Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple — proclaim chatbots as the new websites, and messaging platforms as the new browsers.
“You should message a business just the way you would message a friend,” declared Mark Zuckerberg when he launched the Facebook Messenger Platform for bots. He and the rest of the tech world are convinced that conversation is the future of business.
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Criticism is easy. It seems like everybody has an opinion, but, as the author Harlan Ellison points out, “You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion.” To become informed, though, requires exploration. Design critiques are an important part of any product exploration.
A design critique — where the creator discusses and explains the creation with the rest of the team and/or client — is not about badgering the designer or pushing them to justify every decision they made. That’s just criticism. A good design critique is meant to explore the design, find where it is working and where it could be improved. If done well, design critiques allow everyone on the team to feel as if they have been heard and allow clients to give valuable feedback.
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We’ve all been there. You spent months gathering business requirements, working out complex user journeys, crafting precision interface elements and testing them on a representative sample of users, only to see a final product that bears little resemblance to the desired experience.
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Development and design working together makes better products for our users. Design and usability decisions have a big impact on the developers who implement them, and, ultimately, on the experience of users. For these decisions to be successful and provide users with the best experience, communication between designers and developers is vital.
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