Tag / online
Taking Risks, Earning Trust and Including Co-Workers: User-Centred Design at Deutsche Bahn Operations
In 2016, Andreas Bürgler heard the term “design thinking” being tossed around left and right. “There was a lot of discussion about design thinking, everybody used it as a buzzword, and I felt that few people really knew what it actually meant. I saw some charts, but that was too little for me. I wanted to really learn it myself.” During a three-day Open Course in design thinking at the HPI Academy with Katrin Lütkemöller-Shaw, he realised that this way of user-centred working inspired his “mind and heart”: “This was my thing: to work on topics that are interesting for the users and help them. To build a prototype quickly, and to learn what fits and doesn’t fit immediately.” At the same time, interviewing real users came as an unusual experience: “Having this direct, immediate contact with the user was a challenge”, Bürgler says, and adds with a smile: “You are suddenly talking to the customer – alert!”
The Need to Innovate Topics of disruptive innovation have already become central un..
Feeling in Control: Bank of America Helps Customers to “Keep the Change”
The bank hoped to bring a human-centered angle to an industry which is hardly known for innovation. They were especially interested in the customer segment of boomer-age women with children. To conduct the ethnographic research, a team of five BoA employees partnered up with four agency designers. In their user research, the group conducted interviews and observed families in Atlanta, Baltimore, and San Francisco. According to IDEO designer Sally Madsen, the team was “talking to people who were great at saving, and people who struggled with it, taking inspiration from some of the existing, every-day habits people have around savings“. They observed a dozen families, and followed mothers around when they went shopping or dining. Soon, they realized an interesting pattern: In many families, mothers were in charge of managing finances. An extreme group in this pattern turned out to be single mothers: They are often on a tight budget and have to keep track of their spending meticulously.
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Government’s Content Strategy is the Linchpin of Citizen Experience
The future of good government hinges on content strategy.
This is important for everyone to understand because not just government employees and consultants who work with dot-gov websites are affected by the way agencies deliver content. Ultimately, content planning, organization, usability, and governance for online systems — and the human-to-human interactions they facilitate — affect the lives of people who use them every day. If the content strategy is bad, so goes the citizen experience.
We all can relate to the need for governments to deliver a better customer experience, whether it’s getting the right envelopes in your mailbox or connecting veterans with healthcare commensurate to their selfless sacrifices.
And while content strategy alone can’t fix broken business processes or improve the quality of healthcare, it’s absolutely critical to helping citizens locate, understand, and connect with public services. It’s a tool to help government employees better deliver the right i..
Median UX Salary $95k and More from the UXPA Salary Survey
The median salary for UX professionals is $95,000, according to the just-released UXPA Salary Survey. The survey is conducted every few years and shows both the progress and evolution of UX industry careers.
Results of the 2018 survey indicate:
A greater number of professionals entering the field. More representation outside of the U.S. An increase in jobs in the Southeast and Pacific Northwest. More UX professionals holding senior-level, supervisory roles. A closing of gender-based salary gaps. UX salaries by role A variety of different UX professions were represented, and respondents were able to select multiple titles. “User researcher” was the most popular job title: it was selected by more than half of respondents (56%).
Overall, job titles that include “manager” (department or team) appear to have the highest median salary ($130,500).
This is followed closely by instructional designers. Product managers, technical writers, and technical analysts follow, after a significant de..
The First Five Years: Should I Try to Negotiate the Salary of My First Job?
Getting started in your creative career is tough. You’ve got boatloads of ambition and energy, but you lack experience, the kind of knowledge that feels like you can see into the future because you’ve been there before. So we’ve introduced a new column that will allow you to get the benefit of hindsight before you’ve actually gone through the experience. Welcome to “The First Five Years” where Mitch Goldstein, a professor of design at Rochester Institute of Technology, answers reader questions related to the unchartered waters of beginning a career. This month, Mitch answers a question about how to determine, and maximize, your first salary.
Q. Should I try to negotiate the salary of my first job? Knowing what your first job should pay is challenging: this number will vary wildly depending on geography, industry, studio size, studio clientele, and so on. Make sure to do some online research first (a good start is searching for “junior designer salary” in the city you are looking at)...
Rethinking disruption: User empowerment
First in a series
The idea that incumbent businesses and even whole industries can be unexpectedly disrupted by newcomers to the market is a powerful one, and we have Clayton Christensen and his 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, to thank for this insight. In the over 20 years since the publication of Christensen’s seminal work, however, we have seen violent disruptions that were not predicted by Christensen’s description of disruptive innovation. This article begins to explore how we might update our understanding of disruption in a way that is more useful to businesses desiring to either disrupt or ward off disruption.
Seeking a meaningful definition of “disruptive innovation”Professor Christensen says on his website:
Disruptive innovation describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.First Edition, The Innovator’s DilemmaBut ..
Why the discovery phase is the most important web design step
The discovery phase in web design can help you create products and services that your users really need. Here’s why you need to take it seriouslyCreating websites that people want to use requires an intense amount of research. To truly understand the people who will be using your products and services is the main current of user experience design.
Oriol Beda quipped in UX Collective that “research is still seen as a magic wand that is only waved when problems arise”.
If you don’t know who your audience is, how can you ever expect to design something suited to their wants and needs? The answer is you won’t. You’ll end up with a half-baked product that nobody will want to use. For a better design process, research should be a primary tool for answering problems and not a fall back for when things go awry.
So, what steps can UX/UI designers take to ensure that they’re creating successful work? When it comes to web design, one of the most important steps is the discovery phase.
In this pos..
How to Play the Innovation Jigsaw Game
Image Source : Business InsiderCreative problem solving is a learned skill that every service designer, developer or researcher needs to master. Seeing a problem and devising a possible solution requires specific knowledge within a discipline and a flexible mindset. But new inventions come in many different shapes and sizes. Indeed, when a medical breakthrough is made, it is sometimes (but not always) referred to as ‘wholly original’. This means the solution is novel and no part of it has ever been used before. Which raises the question, are other inventions generally not?
“Most problems are multi-layered and don’t contain one solution alone.”As a matter of fact, no. Most problems are multi-layered and don’t contain one solution alone. This means existing solutions to other problems can be brought together to solve a brief. Often, the very best solutions are the product of other discoveries.
Take Galileo, for example. The Italian is often credited with inventing the first microscope, b..
Who uses Service Design?
“A “service” sign in a room lit up at night” by Mike Wilson on UnsplashNetflix, Google, Spotify & iPhone are all highly aware of the importance of good Service Design. We can see this through their business models. Did you ever wonder why Netflix charges customers on a monthly basis instead of per movie or why Spotify also only offers monthly subscriptions? And why did Apple switch from iTunes to Apple Music? The reason is simple. All of these providers wanted to move away from selling products and into selling services. Through well-designed services, providers hope to build and maintain a relationship with you, the customer. This relationship means that they can predict their revenue better, re-invest in improving customer experiences, up-sell and introduce new products and services more effectively to their existing customer base.
The benefits of brand loyalty, which companies such as Nike developed and cherished in the eighties and nineties, are reaped with more certainty through s..