Process: Envisioning

This is an excerpt from Chapter 9 of Chris Risdon and Patrick Quattlebaum’s new book Orchestrating Experiences: Collaborative Design for Complexity. 2018, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 9: Crafting a Tangible Vision

When you work in a small business, such as a startup, you can get everyone to play off the same sheet of music more easily. The larger your organization, however, the greater the challenge of understanding the end-to-end experiences you want to enable and why. Hierarchy, functional silos, and distributed teams create communication and collaboration barriers. Strategy is distributed in slides with terse bullet points that get interpreted in multiple ways. The vision for the end-to-end experience is lost in a sea of business objectives, channel priorities, and operational requirements. The result: painful dissonance when the dream was a beautifully orchestrated experience.

This chapter is about working with others to craft a tangible vision for your product or service—a North Star. These approaches will help your organization embrace a shared destiny and collaboratively create the conditions for better end-to-end experiences. Read More

This is a sample chapter from the book Communicating the UX Vision: 13 Anti-Patterns That Block Good Ideas, by Martina Schell and James O’Brien. 2015 Morgan Kaufmann.

Chapter 16: Group Design Techniques

To get you started with group design workshop formats, we have collected our most-used techniques for building better products and services with the whole team. There are hundreds of great workshop formats that could easily fill another book, so this is just a small selection of group design formats that we use most often in our day-to-day design practices.

Facilitating a group can be challenging and mentally exhausting. If you are new to facilitation, start small and find a partner who can support you—another member of your creative group can be a great backup or give you the ability to split the group into two for some tasks, so you can concentrate on a smaller number of people. Read More

Whenever a client or team comes to you for help designing anything specific—such as an app—your first question should be: Why an app? Or: Why whatever else they think they need?

UX design should always start with gathering information, understanding users’ needs, and establishing measurable objectives. Just adding design to someone else’s idea or cleaning up what development has created is not a recipe for success. Our job titles communicate our focus on users. But there’s still much pressure from businesses to go faster, and many believe we can just pull ideas out of our heads or quickly clean up turn-key vendor solutions and create something that’s good enough.

We need to start projects by focusing on the experience and push project teams to question the entire product ecosystem and set aside their assumptions so we can organically discover what we really should build and how. One effective approach to doing this is conducting design workshops. Read More