Process: Deliverables

In my job as a UX design consultant, I work with any number of organizations—and often with their in-house designers. This means one of my biggest consulting duties is explaining myself. Why is something a good idea, or what is the best way to approach a task or problem. I derive the subjects of most of my columns directly from my work. The most common occurrence for me is that I’ve typed a long explanation of a process or created a design pattern for a client organization, and I realize that I’m repeating the same work for others. So, if I can generalize something, I try to share it.

A few years back, for this column, I wrote a series on what I called design tools, covering software, deliverables, and design methods that I commonly used. Lately, my six-year-old column “Tools for Mobile UX Design: Task Flows” has been coming up in discussions about this topic. While it’s not truly out of date, and I still agree with everything it says, it was a bit broad and offered almost too many options. So let’s dive into this topic again, and I’ll discuss some very specific tactics that really help organizations of all sorts get a handle on the design of interactions. Read More

Until recently, I never saw the value in customer journey maps. In fact, throughout my career, I’ve even struggled with the value of personas and scenarios. Many times, stakeholders would just skim over them after our presentations or use them only to prove we were making progress on a project. Design teams, with the best intentions, made every effort to keep personas alive and breathing, only to succumb to other project pressures that demanded annotation, use cases, and itemized requirements.

So why have I written an article on the value of customer journey maps? How did I manage to reach the conclusion that customer journey maps are not only a worthy and effective tool, but also a crucial element on large, enterprise user experience (UX) projects? Because I saw them have a significant impact on a recent project with The Boeing Company, and I’m now a believer.

In this article, I’ll attempt to illustrate the virtues of customer journey maps, the necessary ingredients that make them an intelligent deliverable that encourages conversation and collaboration, and the role they can play in effecting real change in large organizations. Read More

A prototype is a primitive representation or version of a product that a design team or front-end-development team typically creates during the design process. The goal of a prototype is to test the flow of a design solution and gather feedback on it—from both internal and external parties—before constructing the final product. The state of a prototype is fluid as the team revises the design iteratively based on user feedback.

Why Are Prototypes Important?

Tom and David Kelley of the design company IDEO have perfectly summed up the importance of prototyping by saying:

“If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a prototype is worth 1,000 meetings.” Read More