Andy is a design founder turned startup investor and coach. He loves speaking at conferences like Smashing Conf and is a founding member of the Adobe Design Circle.
Most product teams commonly adopt a feature-centric mindset, finding them convenient for brainstorming, drafting requirement documents, and integrating into backlogs and ticketing systems. In this article, Andy Budd shows how fixation with features might be holding you back and how making a few small tweaks to your process could make an entire world of difference.
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The so-called “Double Diamond” is a great way of visualizing an ideal design process — but it’s just not the way most companies deliver new projects or services. Andy Budd proposes a new “Double Diamond” idea that better aligns with the way work actually gets done and highlights the place where design has the most leverage.
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In this article, Andy Budd, curator of UX London and Leading Design conferences, outlines some of the things that make a potentially amazing presentation, as well as a few big gotchas. If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to get a speaking slot at a conference, this article is for you.
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In this article, Andy Budd shares his way of requesting feedback: rather than sharing a linear case study that explains every design revision, the first thing to do would be to better frame the problem.
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Andy Budd is a firm believer in cross-functional pairing and thinks that some of the best usability solutions emanate from the tech team. However, at some point the experience needs to be owned, and it shouldn’t be owned by the last person to open the HTML file and “touch the truck”. If designers are happy for developers to “own the code”, why not show a similar amount of respect and let designers “own the experience”? After all, collaboration goes both ways. So if you don’t want designers to start “optimizing” your code on the live server, outside your version control processes, please stop doing the same to their design.
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Because digital products and services play an increasingly important role in the day-to-day operations of normal businesses, it no longer makes strategic sense to outsource these activities wholesale. As a result, we’re seeing companies move away from the old way of engaging with agencies and towards something much more collaborative. Working as part of an integrated team helps to prevent projects from being thrown over the fence, breaking the three-to-five-year cycle of redesign and stagnation. However, finding and retaining digital talent is still a major problem, and only getting worse. Here are seven simple techniques that traditional companies can adopt to help them find the talent they need to thrive in today’s digital marketplace.
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There are around 100 web conferences in the UK every year. The picture across the rest of Europe looks just as abundant, with at least half a dozen conferences in every major city from Berlin to Barcelona. At the same time, smaller towns like Malmö, Faenza and Freiburg have become surprise hubs. Today’s conferences have moved away from the simple dissemination of information to become experiences in their own right. Often the people and location have become more important than the talks themselves. As such, the choices seem endless and picking the right conference can be a challenge — but it hasn’t always been that way.
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