Doing is better

Improve this important part of your marketing today — Pandemic or not, webinars can be a powerful tool in your educational or commercial strategy — or they can be boring, bad, and a waste of time. I’ve spent years working with companies to improve their verbal and visual storytelling and applying it to webinars and presentations. …

How to grow and become more efficient through your projects — There aren’t any perfect projects. Just like there aren’t any projects so terrible you can’t learn anything from them. It doesn’t matter if it’s a home run or a complete disaster—a post mortem will help you grow and become more efficient going forward. What is a post mortem? A post mortem is a structured follow-up…

We’re not always smarter in numbers. — As anyone who’s been in design long enough knows, design by committee rarely ends well. Whenever you have input and opinions from several people, you need a way to either sort through it or discard it. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a Frankenstein’s monster kind of thing, where everyone’s had…

Using user research to improve your product or website. — User research is key to a successful design. There’s no way around it. If you don’t do any research involving your existing or potential users, you’re simply guessing. And none of us are that great at guessing. Today, we’ll take a look at one way of doing user research. …

Have you ever tried a new app, only to realize you have no idea how to use it? Few things can transport a person from calm and happy, to frustrated and angry, quite the way modern technology can. …

You never know what the future will bring. — Yep, I’m here to nag you a bit about that portfolio that you haven’t updated in a while. Yes, it’s time to get to work on it again. Yes, even if you don’t plan to look for a new job right now. Yes, even if your client roster is full…

Don’t fall in the trap of letting a manager’s toxic behavior affect you again and again. — When you go through your professional life, you’ll come across all kinds of managers. And you’ll likely realize that there’s a lot of truth to the Peter principle—that is, that people in an organization tend to rise in the hierarchy until they reach past their competency level. In other words…

You can’t give them what they need before you know what they need. — It’s common for a client to come to a meeting with a (half- or fully) finished solution that they want help turning into reality. It’s just as common that what we end up doing is far from what they asked for in the first meeting. And the reason is key…

Selling design work isn’t an easy feat. Selling user experience work might be even trickier. Like all expertise, user experience work (and user-centered design work) takes time and time costs money, and few companies have unlimited funds in today’s increasingly globalized marketplace. As the craft of UX design isn’t as…