I wish someone had told me this as a child. The point of elementary school is not to learn. The point is not to train you for an adult life. The point of elementary school is to practice following instructions. Let’s jump to high school. The point of high school is not to learn. The…
SME stands for Subject Matter Expert. It means that you have extensive experience doing tasks in a particular field. The question is “If you are looking for a designer, should you try to find one that is also a SME for the target domain?” The answer may seem counter-intuitive, but experience doesn’t help, it usually…
There is a technique I use alot when thinking about the architecture of a SaaS product. It’s called Main Street. It comes from when I visited Disney Land. The technique makes an analogy of building a product to designing a theme park. You have to decide where everything lives and how the roads interact with each other.…
What is the best method for a designer? Storyboards or Prototypes? Storyboards These are used to tell a specific story. You can not click wherever you want. It’s just a series of screens in a chronological order. I have used Visio, PowerPoint, Photoshop, Whiteboard, Paper and Balsamiq to make these in the past. They are…
When do you give up? Let’s put that another way, When do you realize you made a mistake and try something different? Yes, that sounds much better. Yet, it’s the same thing. I have seen so many companies refuse to acknowledge the truth of a bad situation and stop the madness. When something is going…
I love April Fools. It is permission to have a sense of humor once a year. It takes time to come up with a good joke. It should be clever and not too mean. One year I told my dad that we were pregnant with our fourth child. He got really angry. I don’t have…
I saw an interesting question on UXExchange about product testimonials. Are they good or useless? We all know that referrals are tremendously important to people in their decision making. An advertisement for a new restaurant is worth a fraction of a recommendation from someone about the restaurant. This is why Yelp and Amazon recommendations exist. So it…