🙌 Creativity can be defined as a lot of things but one part of it for me is definitely being able to let go of perfection and 'being right' and embrace the messiness of 'just trying stuff'. This resonates with me today because I feel like I can spend a lot of time trying to be creative but I never let myself go *too much* because I'm aware of not going too far out of the box and being crazy. I need to remember that it's the next phase of the design process which can (and should) apply real world constraints and refinements to my creative ideas, and to not let my head stop me from going all out in the pure creativity phase. Does this resonate with anyone else? #MaybeJustMe 😳 • • #CreativeProcess #Creativity #Design #DesignProcess #Designers #WebDesign #GraphicDesign #graphicdesigner #UX #UXD #UXDesign #DesignWork #DesignLife #UXProcess #UXLife #BeingCreative
Happy Wednesday! Because it's never too early, I've put together a list of some of my most loved items that I use every day as a designer or that I've gotten design inspiration from, and turned it into a festive gift guide for designers 🎅✨🎁 On one of the items, I managed to wangle an exclusive promo code for 20% off for you guys which I'm very happy about 😊 Link in bio - Enjoy!! • • #UX #UXD #UXDesign #UXDesigner #GraphicDesign #GiftsForDesigners #VisualDesign #HolidaysAreComing #Xmas2016 #Chanuka2016 #Holidays2016 #DesignGifts #GiftInspiration #DesignInspiration #DesignInspo #WebDesign #SebLester #Letraset #Leuchtterm #Patternity
This morning I ran a fun workshop with product managers, developers, marketing and other designers to work on a new feature for our app. We utilised personas to match feature requirements to user needs, and we used the Crazy 8 process (which I've detailed in another post) to generate more specific ideas for how the feature will work. I always get energised from practicing creative facilitation techniques SO I'd love to know - what are some techniques you guys use to run design workshops? AND what are some of the struggles you face when doing workshops ? • • #UX #UXD #UXDesign #UXDesigner #CreativeFacilitation #Workshops #DesignWorkshops #DesignSprint #DesignMeetings #CreativeProcess #WorkshopTechniques #ProductDesign #WebDesign #MultiDisciplinary #multidisciplinarydesign #MultiDisciplinaryTeam
Back when I was a junior UX designer, I worked in an amazingly supportive UX team with two seasoned senior designers (Clara + Will!) They mentored me, challenged me, helped me grow, watched as I made countless mistakes and helped me learn the lessons from those mistakes. After I left that company, I worked for a design agency who treated me the opposite - like I was stupid, giving me only the most basic tasks and cutting off my opportunities to develop. I learned lessons there too, about how NOT to treat junior designers. I've written some of my thoughts down on how we can care for our juniors better - link in bio :) • • #UX #UXD #UXDesign #JuniorDesigner #SeniorDesigner #LeadDesigner #DesignTeam #DesignTeams #DesignMentor #UserExperienceDesign #AlwaysLearning #Mentor #Mentoring #UXTeam #UXTeams
Rooting around my house today and I found my old set of Mental Notes cards. Each card describes an insight into human behaviour and suggests ways to apply this to designing apps and websites. They are a great resource to help you apply human psychology to your design decisions. The cards are sold out now but there is now a wealth of info online and offline about the psychology of design. A great place to start is Susan Weinschenk's (@thebrainlady) book, '100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People' 👌 • • #UX #UXD #UXDesign #ProductDesign #WebDesign #DesigningForPeople #UserCentredDesign #UCD #PsychologyOfDesign #DesignInsights #UserExperience #UserExperienceDesign
What stage are you on today?? I'm on #5 😂 I say less pretending everything is perfect all the time and more normalising the fact that this shit is HARD! But that it is all okay in the end and that everybody feels exactly the same as you do. • • #CreativeProcess #DesignProcess #UXProcess #DesignIsHardWork #ImposterSyndrome #Design #UX #UXD #UXDesign #ProductDesign #VisualDesign #AlwaysLearning
Every few months, I ask my team to block out a day in their calendar - completely meeting free! - for "Learn A Thing" day. That's a day purely for us to focus on building a skill related to design. At the start of the day, I ask people to plot on these axes where they think they stand at the beginning of the day. And at the end of the day, we revisit and replot. The gains are lovely to see! • • #AlwaysLearning #CreativeFacilitation #Workshop #RunningWorkshops #UX #UXD #UXDesign #Sketching #BuildingConfidence #DesignMastery #DesignLife #DesignProcess #UXLife #UXProcess
For pages that have lots of information on them, I like to employ the "Far Away" test. If I take a few steps back, can I still see the information hierarchy of the page clearly - can I still understand what the important focus of the page is and where I need to look? It often helps to get out of the tiny details of the page and looking at it more as a wireframe again to observe the visual importance that is being placed on each element. • • #UX #UXD #UXDesign #Usability #InteractionDesign #IxD #Wireframing #Wireframes #VisualDesign #UIDesign #UXUI #DesignProcess #UXProcess #DesignLife #UXLife
Today's reminder to myself: if anybody criticises your creative work, remember that there can be a fine line between abysmal and genius. Trying to remember that as long as I believe in my work, my confidence might even sway their opinion too 💪 • • #Design #DesignLife #DesignProcess #DesignInspo #DesignInspiration #Confidence #Creativity #CreativeProcess #GeniusVSInsanity #DesignQuotes #BelieveInYourself
Quickly story boarding a user journey for our app means that you have to take liberties with things like, you know, people's faces! 😳 (Humans can look like that right!?) Sketching the experience users have as they go through this journey helps me to sensecheck whether the order + logic of the flow makes sense in real, human terms. Sometimes this picks up glaring errors better than just relying on cold, impersonal logic flows. • • #UX #UXD #UXDesign #Design #UserFlow #Sketching #UXLife #DesignLife #DesignProcess #UXProcess #ExperienceMapping #BadSketching #UserJourney #Storyboard #Storyboarding #Sketch #Sketches
Spending this lovely Sunday at the V+A museum, one of my favourite museums for art and design in London 😍 Inspiration is everywhere, even at the information point which has this incredibly piece hanging over it!
These might look like scribbles in a sketch book but they are real-life pieces of furniture from Japanese design studio, Nendo. Officially inspired. I love their work! 👌
What happens when you ask a different designer each month to design a graphic of their favourite drink, and answer some questions on their design process, tools and inspiration? This does!
This month I was talking to Amrita Bharij, a London-based UI/UX designer who loves hand-rendered fonts and video games.
Check out the interview, where she talks about her fave tools, what inspires her as a designer and a better look at her favourite drinks made visual.
(PS if you had to try one of these, which would it be? My vote is for the White Russian 😋)
Using sharpies or markers to sketch with in your notepad? Dedicate one loose sheet to being your backing paper so that the markers don't bleed through to the page underneath. Move it between sheets every time for a blemish-free notepad.
Today we are getting our stakeholders involved in the design process: they are going to sketch with us to collaboratively produce ideas!
So, as a warm-up exercise (because our product managers + developers need some warming up to get creative!), everyone has been asked to sketch something we (as Brits 🇬🇧!) know very well - how to make a cup of tea.
The idea of this exercise is to warm up their creative muscles but also to show that there are lots of different ways to represent a concept, and every way is okay.
It was becoming a familar pattern. My team were doing frequent research and testing, generating lots of insights into our various user groups. They were writing up the insights - easily readable documents with main findings for our stakeholders - and presenting back to the whole team. And even better, those insights were being fed back into our designs.
However, a missing link in the process became clear to me during a conversation with one of our developers when, I mentioned something we had discovered in testing, and she said “yes but that was only with 6 users”.
I realised that, because in that testing session we only tested with 6 users, she felt that this was not a representative sample to have conclusive evidence on why something should be a particular way.
It began to dawn on me that although we were doing regular testing, there was nothing to string it all together, to show the team that we have a lot of knowledge and insights about our particular users, derived from hours and hours of interviews, testing and ethnographic studies.
This problem reminded me of the clever User Research Dashboard that was created for HMRC:
Simply, this is a sheet of paper stuck on a wall that the HMRC design team could use to detail how many user research participants they had, how many days had elapsed since last testing, and how many team members had observed the session.
What works about this is that it visualises to your team exactly how many users your designs have faced and how consistently you are researching. Your team can get more of a sense of how much knowledge on your users you have.
Inspired, I created a similar version for my team (download here) and stuck it up by our sprint board, making a point of running through the figures each stand-up. The one adjustment I made was to include another area to make it clear what is being tested next session. This can be helpful to make sure that the entire team know what the focus is for next testing and help anchor the team around it.
(And, pro-tip: if you have a good relationship with your developers, they may even code up a digital version for easier updating and even more visibility!)
For me, the main takeaways from implementing this dashboard with my team were:
The insights and findings of your research don’t stay locked up in the minds of only the UX team. The dashboard is a constant reminder to the wider team that research is continually happening and gives them visibility on precisely what we are testing or working towards testing at any given time. It helps to build user research into the cadence of our sprints and it is much more discussed now that it has a constant visible presence.
This in turn means that the whole team can feel more involved in the research and be a part of making it happen. This has implications down the road for everyone to feel much more bought into the findings and insights.
Crucially, the dashboard helps to drive home the message that we are following a user-centred design process and that our decisions are based on clear rationale and constant contact with real users.
Do you have a dashboard, or similar? What are your experiences of evangelising user research to your wider team? Share in the comments!
