A forgotten UX need: Selection by exclusion

Time to read: 3 minutes Today I was advertised a lovely-looking wine subscription box. Seems genuinely smart, as it asks you flsvour preference questions, like “the evening is winding down, are you most likely to reach for a platter of cheese, a sponge cake, or macarons?”. But. Like many other services like it, it does not account for managing selections […] continue reading »

5 tips for a better UX portfolio

Time to read: 8 minutes Have you ever had to put a UX portfolio together? I have. And I’ve had to go through bunches of them when interviewing people, trying to decide who might be a good future colleague. It’s very difficult. I recently participated in a portfolio feedback session with MA students in User eXperience (UX) in which another […] continue reading »

Reduce the cognitive load of Movie Night

Title with image of pop-corn

Time to read: 5 minutes All modern internet-enabled things have been busting my imaginary balls since they entered my life. But none has caused so many headaches as NETFLIX. And Netflix is kind of awesome, because it’s given us shows like House of Cards and Grace & Frankie.  But Netflix has no clue whatsoever how to deal with Movie Night.  […] continue reading »

Don’t panic, this is an agile experiment!

Diagram of the process

Time to read: < 1 minute After many months of requests from multiple product owners who never talk to each other (and I am including marketing in that group), we (the design team with me as Head of UX / sole UX person) are finally beginning an experiment with the blessing of our Head of Product! As of this Friday, all […] continue reading »

Wireflows for product status 

Time to read: < 1 minute We launched our Free Credit Report product earlier this month, so I can finally share this!! I was reviewing the backlog with our product owner, and instinctively started drawing the signin/up flow and mapping story codes to it. It looked ok, but needed some tidying up, so I cleaned it up in Balsamiq and added […] continue reading »

“What is UX” for Startups

Time to read: 2 minutes I’m at a startup, as Head of UX, shaping a product that’s launching next week, and helping the team find ways of working that make them be more productive and feel more empowered. One of the challenges with the otherwise small and jovial company, is that there is already a silo: Marketing. What’s wrong with […] continue reading »

How to win at UX

Time to read: 5 minutes UX is trendy, and we should all rejoice… Except UXers often work to unrealistic expectations, (“make this product user-friendly in 8 weeks”) try to solve non-existent problems (“build that team a dashboard with metrics XYZ”), and are seldom allowed time to do real research or work as a team (“we don’t have time for that, […] continue reading »

Why are UX take home tasks so crap?

Time to read: 9 minutes The UX industry suffers from a delusion: that the take-home task is a good way to understand what each candidate for a job is capable of. This isn’t 100% wrong, but it sure as hell is flawed!! I’ve written about why I think this is flawed, included some examples of – REAL – good and […] continue reading »