#uxtotd

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Cultivate A Love Of Learning

The tools, techniques, and knowledge that we apply to our work as designers is constantly changing and evolving. It can be hard for seasoned professionals to keep up. Most of the skills that designers need can’t be learned in school. So, what do entry-level professionals do if they want to achieve?

New professionals and students need to adapt their knowledge to an ever-changing field and develop a disciplined approach to staying on top of the industry. Skills are learned on the job, and some fields, like financial systems, government agencies, and medicine, demand industry-specific approaches and solutions.

Center Centre is a new UX Design school that tries to meet these challenges by providing workshops with industry experts, and hands-on work in real-world projects with companies and non-profits. It also offers a collection of the latest resources and tools that will be used on the job. It’s a school that focuses on practical, immediate applications in the design field while emphasizing the importance of developing a lifelong practice of being curious, asking questions, and learning along the way.

adapted from “Teaching UX Designers To Always Be Learning” by Jared M. Spool

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The Obstacles of Collaboration

Collaboration is far more complex than people realize, far more productive than they imagine, and much more about behavior and culture than tools and activities.

The three ways people misunderstand collaboration: They oversimplify what it is. They believe it to be ineffective and inefficient. They focus on the wrong aspect of it.

Collaboration is less skill and more habitual behaviors. Collaboration is a range of habits, dispositions, and techniques, and there’s something for everyone in a collaborative culture.

Team leaders may try to encourage collaboration but base their approach on one of these misconceptions. But don’t let the organization throw the baby out with the bathwater—use the failed attempt as a way to introduce values and encourage the team to review the tool or activity.

adapted from “Misconceptions about Collaboration” by Dan Brown

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Becoming Design-Infused to Gain Market Leadership

It’s one thing to say design is important and to put phrases like “delivering best-of-class customer experiences” into the corporate mission statement. It’s another thing to change a corporation to truly make design a competitive advantage.

Infusing design into the corporate culture means making hard changes. Cutting out traditional ways of doing business. Building the capability to seek out radical opportunities that will change decades-old thinking about how business gets done.

These are intentional activities. They are designed. Design isn’t just about manipulating pixels on the screen. It’s about rendering our intent.

adapted from “Becoming Design-Infused: 2 Necessary Mutations to Organizational DNA” by Jared Spool

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UX Team-of-one Situations

People may not say it directly, but there’s usually an expectation that having someone on a team who will focus on UX will result in changes to the product that will immediately wow everyone. This can be a tricky expectation to manage, since design improvements often happen gradually, over time.

To get a sense of what your colleagues do and don’t know about user experience, take them out to lunch and have a casual conversation. Consider a “Bathroom UX” campaign to promote a broader understanding of the roles and functions of user experience.

UX teams of one sometimes have to be diplomatic, informed, and well-meaning meddlers.

adapted from “A Typical UX Team of One Job Description” by Leah Buley

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The Role of Message Architecture in Content Curation

“A message architecture is a hierarchy of communication goals that reflect a common and concrete vocabulary,” says Margot Bloomstein, author of "Content Strategy at Work: Real-world Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project.”  Message architecture is core to her approach to content strategy and content curation.

Starting your content strategy efforts with a clearly defined and universally accepted message architecture ensures that all the content you deliver to your user is relevant, appropriate, and valuable.

“Message architecture is a yardstick that you can use as you’re auditing the content you already have and determining what content you want to pull from outside sources as you start curating it.”

Every piece of content, whether it's existing or new, should be viewed through the filter of your message architecture. You have to ask yourself, “Does this support my brand? Does it convey the appropriate qualities to my audience?” If the answer is yes, then you include it.

adapted from “Combining Curation with Your Content Strategy” a Virtual Seminar by Margot Bloomstein

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The Secret of a Successful Relaunch: Don’t Have One

Did your team launch an exciting, comprehensive redesign, only to experience...disappointment? It may seem counter-intuitive, but Flip-the-Switch redesigns turn out to be the most ineffective way to get major changes into a design.

Overburdened by corporate politics and huge expectations of amazing improvements the moment the new design is launched, large redesigns often promise too much to too many different shareholders.

But part of the problem comes with the attitude of having a single moment when you’ll launch the new thing. When we single out a particular date when all the changes will be realized, shareholders all jump on the bandwagon. This is bad for our workload and bad for our shareholder expectations.

So what’s the secret to a successful relaunch? Rolling out changes incrementally instead of “flipping the switch.”

adapted from “Extraordinarily Radical Redesign Strategies” by Jared M. Spool

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How Does Progressive Enhancement Serve Users?

Fostering the exchange of information should be a primary focus when constructing any web interface. Progressive enhancement ensures that all content is both available to and usable by anyone, regardless of location, device, or capabilities of the program used to access content. It may not be the same experience across devices, but it will consistently be a positive experience.

Progressive enhancement isn’t about browsers. It’s about crafting experiences that serve users by giving them access to content without technological restrictions.

Progressive enhancement doesn’t require that you provide the same experience in different browsers or stop you from using the latest and greatest technologies; it simply asks that you honor content (and users) by applying technologies in an intelligent way, layer-upon-layer, to craft amazing experiences.

adapted from “Progressive Enhancement and the Content-Out Approach” by Aaron Gustafson

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Responsive Design: A Technique Towards Better Content

When organizations decide to make their website responsive, they often run into a lot of problems. They find that current designs and content don't work well on smaller screens. Things that used to be easy now become difficult.

What they realize is that their website wasn't working to begin with. Images are too small. Designs no longer look the same. Content becomes truncated or disappears altogether.

A smart organization sees this as an opportunity to improve things, especially content. Find new and better ways to work with your teams. Ensure that you're meeting both user needs and business needs. Stop producing content that doesn't add value or bring in profit.

adapted from “Mobile Strategies for Your Content” a podcast interview with Karen McGrane and Jared M. Spool