If you’ve ever travelled, or worked with other cultures, you surely noticed that people can seem different. Strange even. We all have unique cultural norms. These norms influence the way companies do business and the way products are designed. In this article, we’ll look at four distinctive cultural dimensions that…

From local to global — how to serve a worldwide customer base — My mission to understand the world, its cultures, and its people has led me to French-speaking Africa. Cameroon, to be precise. I am here for two months to help an NGO that works on improving awareness and treatment of mental health in the country. Next to my volunteering, I want…

It’s between building and dwelling. — I have worked with some people who bill themselves as both developers and designers at once, united in the same person. Most are either developers who dabble in design or designers who dabble in development, so I can perfectly understand the skepticism that greets me when I myself claim to…

The fine line between persuasion and manipulation: who will protect the user? — Ethics = moral philosophy. It defines what’s good and what’s evil. For a long time, Google claimed not to be evil. Until a few years ago, when they removed the “don’t be evil” motto from their code of conduct. You might wonder. Why did they change it? Were they just…

I applied to a well-known UX conference that said that one of their 2023 topics would be the democratization of research. I don’t know anybody more against that than I am, so I proposed my new-for-2023 conf presentation, “Don’t Democratize UX Research — And Governance For Those Doing It.” …

How to create a library of user insights to keep track of research findings and for a better communication of user needs. — Doing user research, like usability tests, user interviews, and surveys, is certainly at the heart of UX, but what happens to all the gathered data once the research is over? My experience has shown me that interacting with a user can be very insightful, but the insights are lost as…

No one’s releasing detailed data about which roles were eliminated during this year of layoffs. But from a distance, it appears User Experience Research teams have been absolutely crushed. Hundreds of UXRs have lost their jobs. Cast aside despite their hard work, so many talented folks deserve an explanation. Here’s…

Giving up design as a process instead of visual excellence for something bigger — Non-UI UX is dead: noone wants “wireframers” anymore. It has far-flinging implications, but I guess the problem lies elsewhere. Please note: I’m personally affected by this. I don’t have a visual talent — I have considerable knowledge attainable about graphics design, but just like someone with a body type of…

Interviewing is more of an art than a science. Design portfolios, in theory, are supposed to help with that: examples of a designer’s past work tell the interviewer how good the candidate is. Except, well, they don’t. A design is only as good as its effectiveness at addressing some problem…

Expanding from my previous article on my 2-year prediction for how UX has already started splitting and will continue to split… The Great Correction :) looks like this: 1: There are really two types/buckets of jobs in our CX/UX/UI/XD/whatever-you’re-calling-it world. Job A is typically an order taker and production designer to “just make wireframes.” Job A might believe that “defining the problem”…

Improving driving safety with Fitt’s Law. — In a world where touchscreens have become the norm for car interfaces, some automakers are bucking the trend and returning to tactile controls. Hyundai is one such company that has decided to embrace physical buttons. …

How to triage stakeholder feedback for better design outcomes — Ah, feedback — the necessary evil of the design process. Like a gift from your well-meaning grandparents, you have to accept it with a smile, even if it’s not quite what you were hoping for. While “how to ask for feedback” and “how to give feedback” have been done to…

“Too often, leadership directs the product team through a feature-centric Product Roadmap — a set of outputs and features that they require the product team to produce by a specific date. Lean UX teams measure their success not in terms of completed features, but in terms of progress toward specific…

The work that lets you do the work — I was having an excellent conversation recently with a Product Manager friend of mine 👋 about stakeholder management, influence and generally manoeuvring people and politics so that you and your team have even a chance of getting the design work done. Regular readers will know I love a book list…

Recently I sat on a chair at my dentist and he showed me something on his computer and I was shocked how the software looked — it was as if Windows 98 was staring back at me from a fancy new flat screen. When people think about the tech industry…

As designers, it’s important for us to stay up-to-date with the latest design trends, and ideas. One way we often do this is by finding inspiration from other designers’ work. There are many places online to find ideas, but Dribbble and Behance are two of the most popular. However. one…

When discussing accessibility, the first person that pops into the minds of people is probably a person in a wheelchair. Thinking about software accessibility, the next two types of disabilities might come into mind are blindness and deafness. These are three types of disabilities most people commonly think of when…

How radical ingenuity has helped me transform my design process to meet the needs of people who are often excluded — Quantum computing is almost fully realized, artificial intelligence exists in the real world and is used in practical applications, and varying forms of web 3.0 are beginning to tether our digital world with the analog variant in unprecedented ways. As technology continues to advance, our world is starting to resemble…

Tuning Type & Space With an Eye on Height Per Component — Higher density drives efficiency. Frequently used interfaces show you more and offer more diverse tasks via many interactive paths all without scrolling. On the other hand, a deep marketing message warrants a lengthy webpage that drives to a dominant call-to-action in a far less compact density. Yet, “rich app vs…

These t-shirts don’t fit. — Depending on the manufacturer, some T-shirts are created bigger or smaller than others. A Large T-Shirt from one company is more like a Medium from another. Therefore, the size on the label is not an accurate gauge of how comfortably the shirt will fit. …