In this article, let’s look at how to run a kickoff and how to get yourself into a positive position in which you can steer the ship, rather than crash it into the dock.
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There are over two million iOS apps and almost as many Android apps in the growing app economy. However, for every Flappy Bird app that gets lucky and goes viral, there are thousands of apps that take time and hard work to launch and persistence to maintain, grow and avoid the app graveyard. While we typically hear about overnight success stories, this article explores the more typical experience of an appreneur, or app entrepreneur.
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Maxwell is a researcher at a design firm that is working on a mobile payment app. He wants to learn more about how users currently interact with point-of-sale terminals. Maxwell contacts a local grocery store to coordinate times to observe customers as they are checking out. He then asks every fifth customer who checks out to complete a brief survey. Maxwell is engaging in intercepts as part of his recruitment of research participants.
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To attract motivated designers and user researchers, keep your eye on the why. What’s the why? It’s the underlying purpose that brings you and your employees together. Why the why? Because if you focus only on what you need, then you run the risk of filtering down merely to an adequate match for the list of skills needed for defined tasks.
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There are reasons you’re still saying the same thing after all these years — still talking about how it always seems like design gets tacked on to the end of the process. You should be at the concept meeting, you say, where you can make a real difference.
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As the web continues to evolve at a breakneck, Moore’s-law pace, the divisions between traditional design and development are increasingly shifting. The “learn to code” movement is also gaining momentum among designers, but you’d be hard pressed to find a similarly strong movement for other disciplines within a team. Perhaps there should be.
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Let’s say you run a UX team. Better yet, let’s say you don’t. Let’s say you just want to do great work. You want great UX to happen consistently. You want it now. You want it all the time.
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Recently, I was having a discussion with some web design students about the variety of skills a successful web professional must have — skills that go far beyond HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the other technical demands of the profession. During this conversation, one of the students asked me where I learned these skills. My response was not one the class expected.
“By playing in a band,” was my answer. Now, I am not suggesting that all web designers should run out and join a rock and roll band (although there is a glaring shortage of songs about the CSS box model). I do know, however, that many of the skills I honed while playing in a band have contributed to my success as a web designer — as much as, if not more than, my ability to write clean code or design an attractive web page. In this article, I’ll describe how being in a band taught me to be a better web designer.
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The kickoff phase sets the stage for the success of your product. Without properly conducting this phase, your team might as well be working in the dark. The worst enemy in product development, after all, is ambiguity.
During the initial design process for your product, answers will come from brainstorming on the product and from execution at the highest level, with all necessary stakeholders (along with their egos).
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This article will be an introdrction to the human-centered design process. I’ll tell a personal story in which I built a challenged family member a device to help them communicate more efficient and effortlessly and I’ll share lessons I learned from the failures and successes along the way.
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