Good UX is a culture problem. Notes from decades of making it work.
In Part 1 I laid out how this effort to get away from the confusion and cruft on your site has to start with Next follows a set of steps that have worked in previous instances of doing this kind of renewal. Recommit to your customers and how you can truly help them So before Continue reading How to get a good website after your AI Binge (part 2) The post How to get a good website after your AI…
Eighteen months ago I told you We will need to know our users better than we ever have before we even start to design something, or we will flood the zone with so many bad ideas our users will run away from our product or brand at the speed of light. But no, you went Continue reading How To Get A Good Website After Your AI Binge (part 1) The post How To Get A Good Website After Your AI Binge (part…
Medium for some reason thinks I continue to want to read about the demise of Agile project management methodologies for making software. My daily email has headline after headline by Product Managers and Engineering Leads writing why Agile—by which they usually actually mean Scrum, a framework of Agile principles turned into a repeatable, teachable methodology—is Continue reading The Rest of the…
Why software dev is so hard, Part 1, Part 2 Testing in production is really expensive As discussed before, decades of experience teaches us we have to show users what they say they want so we can find out what will actually work for them, and we have to do this often. So often, that Continue reading But what if you could explore a lot of terrain quickly, and not need maps? The post But what if you…
The Limits of Prototyping in Agile Development Central thesis of why software development is hard, and Part 1 So pretty soon in the late 90s it became common to find out what humans wanted out of computing systems by giving them a simulation of the system to play with, a prototype, which could come in Continue reading The Map Is Not The Territory And A Wish List Is Not A Map (2) The post The Map…
Where have all the task decompositions gone? I was talking to a very experienced Head of UX about the state of our vocation when she asked that. I had to agree I have not seen one in years either. A task decomposition is when you take a task and divide it into steps, and then Continue reading The Map Is Not The Territory And A Wish List Is Not A Map (1) The post The Map Is Not The Territory And A…
Scrum has been having a bad time for the last ten years, and thus so has Agile. My favorite article on this is truly exhaustive about all the problems we have encountered in the last two decades trying to deliver software of any kind using these methodologies. (I know nothing about the writer, this could Continue reading The Two Rules Of Software Creation From Which Every Problem Derives The post…
"OKRs say nothing fundamental about what kind of relationship the company wants to have with their customer beyond "let's make money this specific way right now". It's not a framework that includes a vision of how that specific money-making thing fits in the long-term relationship between the company and the customer..." The post If culture eats strategy for breakfast, OKRs are just the cheap…
I left London after ten years, and moved to Berlin, for various reasons. There is a lot of UX work here, but most of it is in digital B2C Product creation in the lean / Agile / data-informed variety for start-ups (or companies that think they want to be start-ups). Showing up with twenty years Continue reading Making Promises We Don t Know How To Keep The post Making Promises We Don t Know How To…
The first time I actually worked on something we could term User Experience, I was changing the default positions of my icons on a UNIX workstation running some version of SunOS (in other words, it was a long effing time ago) and part of that was designing some icons in black and white, pixel by Continue reading Content Strategy: unless you are making something small, you need it The post Content…