Last week, I was invited to participate as a field expert to be interviewed by students for the course with the name Cutting Edge Design, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the faculty of Industrial Design at the Technical University of Delft. In my work, I focus on design and innovation. The idea behind the course was that students are introduced to cutting edge theoretical concepts about organizations, mainly focussing on behavioral dynamics. Then they apply them to the reality of innovation projects. The idea is that the success of design in innovation largely depends on organizational change. That the success of…
The other day, I was attending an online clinic on conversational design. In the announcement it said that conversational design is about getting the right information at the right time to the user. That, to me, is the goal of any interface. You can’t get more fundamental than that.
People have tasks, jobs to be done, and for that they need the right information at the right time. And the opportunity to take action based on that information. If I deconstruct any interface, there is information and action. We usually have different mental models in our heads when we think…
The message that everyone can design is insulting to designers who have spent their lives honing their design skills. The speed of Design Sprints is insulting to design researchers who see their work reduced to half assed quick and dirty guesswork.
But the Design Sprint not about design as a craft. Design Sprints are about something else. Design sprints bring two wonderful things to the world.
Both are landslide achievements.
Design sprints are populated by managers, decision makers, key stakeholders. Or…
As UX designers, we are constantly pushed to find ways to enhance engagement. The UX designers at Facebook, Twitter, Google are masters at their craft. They design their apps in such a way that people keep on spending more and more time in them. We all know of the biases and dark UX patterns that keep people glued to these apps. We also know that social media companies are taking steps towards well-being by recognizing the negative impact of too much time on social media. We also know that the distance these media create between people make people be more…
If you do a Google search on “UX pyramid”, you get lots and lots of UX pyramids. If you take a closer look, you’ll see that most people agree about the bottom of the pyramid. Applications should be functional, usable, reliable. No arguments here. If things don’t work, the UX will suck. If we move up to the mid-section of those pyramids, we see that there is also a consensus about the niceness of the experience. Experiences should be desirable, esthetically pleasing, pleasurable, enjoyable, delightful. There are more different terms that we find here but the gist is the same…
In my previous essay, I started thinking about a more holistic view on design. I thought about how design is not just beauty, not just problem solving, but also problem finding, questioning. How design is all of that. The head, the heart and the hands. Today, I wanted to take this train of thought one step further. Today, I wanted to think about how to connect these three functions of design and how design can help bridge the gaps between strategy and operations in most organizations. …
Under the banner of the term design thinking, design has been going through a transformation this past decade. More and more people are discovering the power of design to solve problems. The way that designers think, turns out to be a good addition to the traditional thinking in businesses when it comes to solving (business) problems. Especially when it comes to problems that require navigating uncertainty in complex situations.
When we think about the levels of impact and meaning UX design can have, the UX pyramid is a useful mental model. It shows us that applications can not only be useful, but also convenient, pleasurable and meaningful. The base line is about reliability, functionality and usability.
Change is something that is not controllable. To call the process of change change management implies that it can be controlled, that all you need is a sound strategy and a plan to create change. It creates the illusion that managers can come up with that plan and then everything will be changed according to plan. My experience with change is different. Here are some of the lessons I learned from various change processes…
Artificially created senses of urgency in powerpoint decks don’t change things. Stop pretending they do. Big words will come up during changes. Accept that most of…
Strategic UX Design Consultant @ Zuiderlicht / Design Leadership Forum Member @InVision / Design Thinker / State Secretary of Integration @ Ministry of Design