Writing tagged with #Product Development
-
Implementing Design Feedback
Posted on
Design feedback is a crucial part of the creative process, allowing designers to refine and improve their work. However, implementing feedback effectively can be challenging. This guide will explore some practices for incorporating design feedback into your workflow. 1. Understand the Feedback An ea
-
User-Centered Design Principles
Posted on
User-Centered Design is a common approach to creating products that truly resonate with users. By focusing on the needs, wants, and limitations of the end-user at each stage of the design process, we can ensure that the final product is not only functional but also enjoyable. In this post, we will e
-
Using Data to Improve Design
Posted on
When setting out to create a design for a new product or reimagine an existing product, how we decide what to focus on and how to know if a change is working are critical to understanding and discussing the work. Design by its very definition has to have intent behind it; there is a motivation and a
-
Evaluating Design Success
Posted on
Design is creativity with a specified purpose. Design always has goals and intention behind it. So how do we know when we’ve achieved those goals? Measuring the success of design can be incredibly simple, it can also be one of the most challenging aspects of a design career. With advertising, measur
-
Data Over Dogma
Posted on
When working on design at scale one of the largest speedbumps you’re likely to encounter is a designer that feels like a design needs to change. Whether it’s something relatively small like the padding on a button or a heading’s font size, or something much larger like the layout of a card or the si
-
Understanding Outcomes
Posted on
As we look towards planning for Q3, the product teams I work with have started their quarterly product increment (PI) planning. One thing that came up this week was how to understand or find the outcome for a specific goal or problem. It’s easy to fall into old projects traps such as “we should add
-
Chasing Two Rabbits
Posted on
A Swiss Army Knife is undoubtedly a useful tool, so much so that it has become the “go-to” item when referring to a product that can “do anything” or solve many needs. However, when we closely examine a Swiss Army Knife, it also becomes clear that none of the included items are a “best in class” for
-
Product Discovery Toolkit
Posted on
In Product-Led organizations discovery is critical to understanding what users need and determining the right things to build. There are plenty of tools at our disposal to conduct discovery. In this post I want to highlight a few mentioned in Marty Cagan’s Inspired. What is Product Discovery? Before
-
Shared Lexicon
Posted on
Our research team showcased Dovetail to our team this week. I’m looking forward to spending more time with the product, but something mostly unrelated to the product stood out in their demo. While walking us through the tool they kept having to specify that some of the words they were using meant di
-
Research Beyond Usability Testing
Posted on
Often when I hear designers talk about user research they’re specifically referring to one of two things, usability testing, or validation testing. While there two types of testing are important, there’s so much more in the user testing toolkit that we can use. Usability and validation testing by th
-
Using Object Maps in Design
Posted on
import PostLink from "@components/PostLink.astro"; Came across this post from Adobe and I've been tossing the idea around in my brain for the last few weeks. Using Object Maps in Design The core idea is simple, an object map is essentially a visual representation of the relationships betwe
-
Design for the web
Posted on
While catching up my my RSS feed, I read through Brad Frost’s recent post Should Designers Code? I’ve always agreed with the overall sentiment of the article, especially this bit: Designers need to understand and work with the grain of the medium for which they’re designing. For the web, that means
-
Improving Team Alignment and Understanding
Posted on
As a part of looking to improve our the efficiency and effectiveness of our product and design teams I’ve been reading Discussing Design by Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry. I’d like to boost one of the concepts discussed in the book that I think could benefit a lot of teams I’ve worked with in the pa
-
Solving Complex Dynamic Problems with Systemic Design
Posted on
Over the past few weeks, I've been collaborating with a product team to create an interface for state and academic standards. The primary idea is that a user could select the standards document they want to view and then browse or filter the records for a specific standard. They could then view all
-
Managing Change in your Design System: Workflows and Change Control at Enterprise Scale
Posted on
This past week Knapsack held a session with Nathan Curtis all about managing change in a design system. I took some notes on things I thought were interesting, figured it be worth sharing them here as well. How do I make this [Design Systems] a priority for my organization? Hitching your Wagon Often
-
Systemic Improvement is a Snowball
Posted on
Over the winter break from work I picked up a new game on Steam called Against the Storm. Against the Storm is a rogue-lite city-builder/management sim. Like many other city-builder or management sim games the goal of any specific “game” or “round” is to complete objectives and create a thriving set
-
Culture Eats Strategy
Posted on
Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast This famous quote from Peter Drucker has popped up a few times of the past couple weeks for me. We've been working on ways to improve our processes and strategy for design and how we work with other teams within our organization. I've spent countless hours of th
-
The Production-Ready Myth
Posted on
For years now there have been programs, tools and libraries that all claim to deliver on the same promise, delivering to you “Production-Ready” code. Dreamweaver was entirely based on the idea that you could design a website in their visual tool and it would generate all of the HTML for you, neat! A
-
A Playbook for Accessibility
Posted on
In my work with Design Systems, accessibility often comes up as a topic. Questions can range from the incredibly basic, "What is accessibility?" to the more complex and nuanced, "Is the language of this modal clear enough?" Part of my job is to help guide the designers, developer
-
Diving into DesignOps
Posted on
Over the last few months I’ve been spending more of my time learning and thinking about how to implement a DesignOps practice across the teams I work with. Large portions of my work with Design Systems already relate to a number of DesignOps ideas and principles: helping teams solve for efficiency,
-
Be a Design A11y: An Introduction to Accessibility
Posted on
import { Picture } from "astro:assets"; import { Icon } from "astro-icon"; import contrastExample from "@images/writing/design-a11y/contrast-ratio.png"; This is an introductory overview of Accessibility and how it relates to designing and building digital products and e