Mark Micheli

More UX and Product leaders need to hear Diana DeMarco Brown (she/her)'s wisdom. Diana is a pioneer in the UX field who takes a thoughtful and nuanced approach to assessing the current state of the tech industry. In our recent conversation, Diana shared many insights, including: - How to evaluate a company's culture during the hiring process - Why private equity ownership can result in design divestment - How Product and UX leaders can effectively influence business decisions - Why we don't need to panic with the rise of AI, but we need to think critically and prioritize regulation during this early stage Link to our full conversation: https://lnkd.in/eemDimVb

42

6 Comments

What does it look like to become your own behavior designer? In a recent episode, I had the privilege of having a conversation with Matt Baldwin PhD .Matt is a Behavioral Scientist on the User Research and Design team at Noom. Come and listen to us discuss a variety a topics around behavior, including: -The first steps in behavior change -Habit stacks and temptation bundling -Implementation of habits -Why motivation can only go so far -The importance of identity Behavioral Science with Matt Baldwin: Podgecast | 24 Check out this short clip, and catch the full episode on Noom Vibe (Link in the comments)

35

1 Comment

#Toosday #keepmoving — Today in “outside your comfort zone” saga At 430am MDT in phx, I awoke to no alarm and packed my bags for an overnight in Kansas City for a meeting. It's like muscle memory and anxiety. I reserved an Uber, the driver appeared, I hopped in and for the 41-minute trip, I explained near the end of my trip what I was doing. I explain at the moment and realize my career in its entirety is a coping mechanism for my phobia, if you haven't read my earlier post about my agoraphobia (fear of crowds, new ppl, and experiences). I forced myself to be a storyteller as a full-time job. Imposter syndrome… Antifragile (Nassim Taleb sp?) Hidden Brain (Shankar Vidantham sp?) Among many of the books that exposed me to the concepts that shaped unconsciously how I would interact with the world. The driver was surprised a little, at me making a career out of the thing that created knots in my stomach, butterflies, anxiety, and even physical illness. So again I am reminded how the Obstacle is the Way, (Ryan Holliday's book of the same name.) So as I sit in the exit row, listening to the child and parents terrorized by an uncontrolled variable (child having a tough flight) Your career, your work, and your life all contain the uncontrolled variable. My phobia, your phobias are opportunity, the obstacle you face is the way….toward freedom. You are not your issues, they might make your career meaningful. Your issues can be the Way to become who you are meant to be. As you struggle, remember someone somewhere could help you, listen, and possibly reduce your suffering. I have stated repeatedly I don't know much. Your story has value. Tell it.

27

8 Comments

Research is a function of strategy.  "According to CB Insights, over 90% of all products fail, most commonly due to no market need." Leave yourself time to ask big questions about whether any actually needs your product or service before you decide to launch it. #UXstrategy #UXresearch #Marketresearch

3

1 Comment

Ever wondered about the power design has to align teams? I just published a note I've shared with cross-functional teams in the past that highlights the importance of getting to a concrete discussion quickly, and the role design can play. Concrete Elephants: How to turn the lights on for your team

45

5 Comments

🏔 "Accessibility gets complicated." As we work more with people with lived experience and assistive technologies, our team asks more questions and wants to dig deeper. As that curiosity grows, we’ve made investments in training so we don’t miss out on the opportunity to add to our team’s culture. → Working with our accessibility partners, we’re consistently reminded that there's a range of lived experiences that demand empathy and research. → Screen readers and assistive technologies are complex technologies with nuance that require time and exposure. → WCAG guidelines while robust, can be very technical, very deep and require someone to map multiple needs across a massive amount of information. 🔍 With some research and help from our partners we’ve collected a set of resources for onboarding and training for our team: → Google Web Accessibility Course on Udacity provides an easy on ramp for folks to get some shared language and background into the basic concepts of accessibility. https://lnkd.in/gdCFJ2-C → Digital Accessibility Foundations W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and edX is a rare course on accessibility that provides considerations for designers and product managers to engage alongside more technical team members. https://lnkd.in/gASpZWdY → Deque University Certification Preparation from Deque Systems, Inc provides the go to certification training for engineering folks who are ready to get an official CPACC certification. https://lnkd.in/gp5rPu6J 💎 For other folks looking to setup your own resources for your team here are our big takeaways: → Make accessibility part of your team culture with simple onboarding material to get everyone on the same page. → Provide a range of resources to serve design, product and engineering team members to meet people where they are, including partnerships with organizations that can provide access to people with lived experience. → Advocate for the internal funding and work with your leadership team to consider the organizational value of getting folks on the team trained and certified. 👏 Thanks to Mike Gifford, CPWA from CivicActions for providing examples and guidance of what we rolled out for Exygy onboarding and training. 🙏 Thanks to Sean Dougherty from LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired for his invaluable input and continued partnership. #accessibility #accessibilitytraining #accessibilityonboarding

126

3 Comments

With enough #compute, one could imagine a cloud-hosted UX research platforms like @UserTesting building specialized analytical models. But it's likely out of reach for most small UX research teams, and certainly for any #independent UXResearcher. https://lttr.ai/AR3uS #UXResearch #UXDesign #uxresearch #HundredThousandPounds #UXR #Freelance #LargeLanguageModel

1

Hear, hear! Designing and executing brilliant solutions to the wrong problems is certainly easier (and therefore more common) than poking at the underlying assumptions and pivoting to a more fertile problem space. This piece does a fantastic job highlighting the huge value of doing the latter. Old joke: Q: How many designers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Why does it need to be a lightbulb?

5

Tomorrow I'll give a presentation on design quality at Front-end Conf here in Florida. This is the first time I've spoken on such a topic in a live, public format. Here at the event I've been humbled to hear several people say "I'm excited for your talk." Quietly in my head I'm replying "Me too. I have no idea how this will turn out!" Par for the course with new material. 😎 I've said before that my benchmark is 1 hour of prep time per 1 minute of speaking time for a new talk. This is a 45-min talk and I'm on pace for ~45 hrs of prep time. I won't have all the answers tomorrow but we'll explore: – What is design quality anyway? – Why is it so hard to achieve? – Where do we go from here? This is dialog I hope to see more of in the industry. It's long overdue. I'm holding myself accountable to share more, too. Let's see how tomorrow goes first. #frontendconf

139

22 Comments

If you're a UXresearcher, you should have Alexandra Jayeun L.'s upcoming workshop on your radar. She's teaching "AI for UX Research" virtually over two days (June 20-21, 4 hours/day). It's one of four workshops associated with our upcoming "Designing with AI" conference, but you can just attend the workshop if you can't make it to the conference. Alex is doing some incredibly interesting work at Microsoft, where she's Principal Director of Research and Data Science for their Power Platform. She taught the same workshop last March at Advancing Research, and we're delighted to have her back to tackle such a critical and timely topic. Learn more at the first comment below. #AI #UXresearch #UserResearch #CustomerResearch #DesignResearch #DataScience

96

13 Comments

Last night I attended "You in UX/UI," put on by Out in Tech at Dovetail. Jeremie Gluckman moderated a panel featuring Ricki Munoz, Andrew Tolentino and Nicholas Bochud. A great conversation including points on how design choices that might be less obvious to some (allowing "special characters" in input fields, name length minimums and maximums) can have a big impact on inclusivity. The point was emphasized that this is why actually hiring people from diverse backgrounds and experiences (instead of just showing images of aspirational diversity on the company website) leads to products that better serve a diverse user base. Thanks to Alex Solis and the rest of the Out in Tech organizers. I met many cool folks after the panel. Oh yeah, and I didn't capture this but the Dovetail space is full of cool illustrations. Excited to learn more (and draw more panels!) as I go deeper into exploring UX/UI. 🌈 #ux #ui #graphicrecording #uxdesign #userexperience #userinterface #hci

41

12 Comments

Visuals can be the trickiest part of designing a presentation. To keep your audience you need to illustrate, not decorate. Check out this article from the world of UX design with some handy principles that translate over into presentations as well. https://lnkd.in/dpQ_8hYc

1

I don’t know why I get so hung up on some errors of language. But sometimes I do. The one that is getting my goat today is when people are talking about WCAG compliance. you comply with laws. WCAG is a standard. You conform to standards. So really, we should be WCAG conformant in order to be complying with the laws. Then there are people using the terms header and heading interchangeability. Then there is the (in)famous alt tag instead of alt attribute. It shouldn’t matter because ultimately I understand what you mean. And that’s the whole point of communication. But precision matters to me. And in order to be precise, you have to use the correct terms. The risk of misunderstanding is actually quite high. These things leave even my dog flat. Alt text embedded in the image.

12

3 Comments

Is there a golden question to ask participants during a usability test? 🥇 According to Jeremy from the UXchange podcast, there is one golden question he finds absolutely amazing. After providing the task participants will be work to complete, Jeremy recommends asking participants, "What do you expect will happen?" at each screen as they work through the task. "It gets really interesting when users tell you what they expect to happen, they click somewhere, and then it doesn't happen the way they expected." ❓❓ Would you use this question in your next usability test? ❓❓ What is the golden question you love asking when conducting usability tests? #UsabilityTesting #UserExperience #UXResearch #DesignThinking

13

6 Comments

📚 Here are 3 books I’m loving right now… "Make It Stick" by Peter C. Brown - A must-read on cognitive science and evidence-backed learning strategies. This is one I find myself repeatedly going back to. "Orbiting the Giant Hairball" by Gordon MacKenzie - An old favorite that shows how to nurture innovation even within rigid corporate structures. "Cointelligence" by Ethan Mollick - I’m eating up this new book that dives into the details of working, learning, and living with AI. 💡 What books are inspiring you? #lifelonglearning #learningleader

14

1 Comment

Doing my favorite thing at work today: Analyzing user testing results! I know it's a tired refrain, but nothing replaces listening to and observing real users. 💬 #UXResearch #UXStrategy #UXDesign #UserTesting #UserResearch

29

1 Comment

How to ease design educators (most of whom come from a practice background) into the brutal "publish or perish" culture of academia--and without (gasp!) involving any data-crunching? Turns out, it can actually be a fun, engaging and collaborative process. That was the gist of my Faculty Development workshop at Alliance University School of Design & Creative Arts. If that's something you struggle with too, feel free to use (with attribution) this handout - or simply call me! Special mention to Nishant Shah for triggering the idea with his Facebook post!

31

5 Comments

The Why and How of your design system practice matter a lot more than the What. The What is your components, tokens, and content. It’s a finite set of stuff that supports a limited set of use cases, and it will probably (hopefully!) be different in a year. And, broadly speaking, any finite set of resources becomes hard to sell at scale for enterprise system teams, most of whom are staring at a complex landscape of varying technical and business requirements. And the investment to build the What that every team needs is unrealistic out of the gate. The Why and How, on the other hand, are sustainable and have universal appeal, and can gain traction with minimal up front effort. I have yet to meet a product team member - design, engineering, product or other - that doesn’t want to accelerate delivery and reduce headaches in QA (psst that’s part of your Why). When it comes to selling the value of your system, it’s the difference between: “We have React components to help you go further faster!” “We don’t use React, we use Vue.” (Womp) and “We exist so you can design, build, and ship better UIs faster with fewer headaches.” “I want that! Do you support Vue?” “Not yet! But help us understand what you would need and we’ll work towards that!” “I can’t wait!” You won’t be able to meet every team’s need. But you’ll generate demand - and having a list of teams clamoring for your support is really handy when budget season comes around.. Focus your effort on How you capture and reuse existing solutions - and inform the creation of standards and assets based on the unique needs of your team. Sell stakeholders and users on the Why that everyone can buy into. And assume What is in your system will constantly evolve. If it doesn’t, it’s time to re-examine the inputs driving your priorities. #digitalproduction #design #development #designsystems

15

2 Comments