Mechanics, mindset, and alchemy

Let’s say that one day, I wrote out the steps of a typical UCD-based process on a whiteboard (just pick any reputable textbook ;-)…and then someone walked into that room, memorized this process as a template or recipe and then executed it accurately — is that person now a designer?    That’s exactly the question a professor […]

Reading List: Fall 2015

Various books and articles are keeping me busy with useful ideas and perspectives this Fall, such as the following: • Articles on Product Management: I must admit I’ve had some rather poor experiences with Product Managers lately, so I’ve been digging deep into what it means to be leading the product function of an organization. What […]

Designing with/for “people”

It’s a truism to say that designers in the broader UX practice must have well-developed “soft skills” to be effective in the field. I gotta say, that trite phrase irks me, if only because it implies something less-than-substantial, almost an afterthought of ephemeral squishiness to tack onto the “hard skills” of… exporting precisely cut Retina-optimized […]