Hello I'm Paul

What's capturing my imagination as I create valuable customer experiences, products & services through user-centred design. www.pauljmorris.co.uk

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The old fashioned way of learning still works! Proven by new technology.

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CEO - not just chief executive officer, now chief experience officer

According to the 2015 Wolff Olins Leadership Report, the CEO has evolved into something new: The designer-in-chief of corporate culture, a mentoring figurehead who gets into the trenches with his employees and inspires them to create the next great innovation.

How? By instilling them with the qualities that designers have: the ability to recognise problems or opportunities, propose fixes, and iterate those fixes until they’ve found the one right solution.

The unprecedented level of change, from increasingly connected customers, new disruptive start ups and demands of younger employees means todays CEO needs to inspire teams to create products or experiences that improve the customer experience. 

They rally the troops rather than outright command them. 

They empower their employees to think and work like designers, observing problems and developing solutions, and getting them to market not suffocating in bureaucracy.

It’s a good reminder that improving user and customer experience starts first and foremost with leadership and culture, and are not solely the domain of a department or an agency.

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Couldn't say it better myself....the language of a business focused on the inputs not the outputs - customer focus culture.

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All the best user experiences have a story to tell

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I've been lucky enough to have had the opportunity to spend some time with two of the best Experience Design agencies over the last couple of weeks - IDEO and Huge inc.

  Seeing the culture and operating model of both companies reminded me of a particular paragraph in Peter Thiel's 'Zero to One' book.

  'A company's most important strength is new thinking....'

  He then goes on to say 'Success to move from 'improving what we do' to 'Reimagine what we can do' depends on convincing enough people to build a different future and questioning received ideas'.

  IDEO and Huge inc. are constantly helping businesses and brands to reimagine what they can do.

  And they are achieving this with real clarity of purpose and approach, summarised as:

  Explore - Create - Test to Learn

Understand your user and know who you are solving for and why

Understand the context of your user, look at the world through their eyes

Find inspiration in unexpected places, continue to learn fresh perspectives

Design to learn by making prototypes, collaborating with users to test and iterate and refine

Just imagine if more businesses were so focused on solving & designing for customer problems.

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So this week its time for me to learn how to code, and create my own website. 

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Typography - nice overview of visual design concepts and Type

FROM PAPER TO SCREEN from Thibault de Fournas on Vimeo.

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Nice tool for agile working to support the user experience

http://bit.ly/1C5XStY

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Product of the year for agile UX teams. I for one will be giving this a go.

https://lookback.io/

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Why Personas are so important in creating valuable design and experiences

“A persona is a user archetype you can use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design. By designing for the archetype—whose goals and behaviour patterns are well understood—you can satisfy the broader group of people represented by that archetype.”—from “Perfecting Your Personas,” by Kim Goodwin http://bit.ly/17ihgsb

And they remain even more relevant today, based on this article at UX Matters http://bit.ly/1dOHKiw

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The Xmas present I really wanted in hindsight!

https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/

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Better User Research through Surveys

Surveys are increasingly becoming a more accepted tool for UX practitioners. Creating a great survey is like designing a great user experience—they are a waste of time and money if the audience, or user, is not at the centre of the process. Designing for your user leads to the gathering of more useful and reliable information.

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Fjord looks to help answer what are the most significant design and experience challenges we will face in 2015

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This has huge potential to get to a new level of consumer insight through User Research - after all its not what people say or do rather how they feel that really matters.

Emotient Product Overview from Emotient on Vimeo.

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The Magic Toyshop - Creating a valuable customer experience online

I was tasked with creating a new prototype website for The Magic Toyshop a retailer of toys, games, and magic tricks. For over 30 years they have successfully focused on traditional toys, but have moved with the times and now offer a full range of new and vintage products to appeal to children and adults alike. 

Through their new website, they want to showcase their products, while maintaining their brand image of a highly-curated offer that chooses hand-picked quality over quantity.

Using detailed customer insight, competitive analysis, user research and lean UX methodologies such as Design Studio process I was able to design with vision and optimise with feedback, creating a prototype (link in presentation) that helps customers find what they want & experience the brand in a meaningful way.

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