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. Over the course of that journey, I picked up experiences that I’ve tried to condense into 25 ways for you to improve your webinars.

Here are my tips on how you can deliver a great webinar.

The Benefits of Webinars Are (Almost) Limitless

Webinars are great both for internal and external (commercial) use. If you want to educate your staff…

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 on a completed project, a retrospective, or debrief in other words. They’re essential for growth and for avoiding repeated mistakes. A way to keep the good, and get rid of the bad ways of going about different tasks.

Post mortems aren’t something you should do every now and then. They…

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 a say about where to steer the project, and no one actually in charge. It’s going to be an expensive, drawn-out process, and the end results will likely be your version of the Pontiac Aztek. It’s not a pretty sight.

Compromising in a design project is a natural occurrence and…

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. Let’s talk about card sorting.

What is the use of card sorting?

One of the key elements of a product’s or website’s ease of use is how the information is organized. …

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. All it takes is something not working, or not working the way we expect.

Let’s go over seven common pain points in app design so you can make sure to address them on your next project.

No onboarding explaining complicated interactions

So your app is brilliantly using all these modern interactions like pinches, zooms, swipes, double taps, and what’s his name.

Nice.

Have you actually tested if…

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 and you’re up to your neck in upcoming projects.

You don’t know what’s coming, what the future will bring, or what it won’t bring. So let’s make sure you’re prepared anyway.

It’s Too Late to Start When You Need It

So you got a safe job. You’re comfortable with your role, you like your colleagues (except for that one…

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, there are a lot of bad managers out there. (And some truly good ones, but that’s for another article.)

Let’s take a look at common warning signs of bad management.

They Are Late To Internal Meetings

Everyone can be late for a meeting. Stuff happens. It’s all good.

Some people though, and often times they’re the…

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 to why you, the professional UX or graphic designer, can justify your role.

Don’t Let Your Client Self-Diagnose

Designers in general, and junior designers in particular, have a tendency to just say yes to whatever a client comes asking for. …