In today’s burgeoning digital market, every company stands to lose by avoiding alignment with digital policies. By the same token, you have even more to gain by incorporating those policies into an overall long-range strategic plan for your digital enterprise. By complying, you’ve ensured that your home on the web remains secure.When creativity is balanced with guidance — the real goal of these policies — then digital workers are freer to innovate and work more efficiently than in other organizations. Digital workers, especially web designers and developers, need to recognize that policy influences their products online much as it does offline.
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When talking to potential clients, be aware that many will have never solicited a professional design service and likely have little understanding of the design process itself, or they have had a poor experience in the past. For many clients, it can be an anxious jump into the deep unknown, a big financial investment steeped in risk. Our knowledge and experience shouldn’t be seen as a free commodity. However, at times, a little patience and empathy are required on our part. Many designers will agree that clients, for the most part, need us to guide them through the design process, to ask the difficult questions and ultimately to reassure them by delivering measurable results.
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Yes, deliverables can slow us down and result in documentation that no one reads. But the right deliverables anchor teams in a united product vision, provide early validation for product ideas and speed up (the right) making activities. Those are worth the drawbacks for me. “Get out of the deliverables business” has become quite a mantra in the lean startup and UX movements. What follows is an account of Rian van der Merwe’s journey in navigating stormy design seas together with the community. Remember, deliverables aren’t bad. Bad deliverables are bad.
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Many of the skills Jeremy Girard honed while playing in a band have contributed to his success as a web designer — as much as, if not more than, his ability to write clean code or design an attractive web page. He learned skills critical to his success, such as the importance of tailoring your set list (or your presentation) to make an early connection with your audience, or the ability to speak clearly and confidently in public. In this article, Jeremy will describe how being in a band taught him to be a better web designer.
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Storytelling is not just a tool to engage users. It is also a powerful way to teach organizations more about their customers. Most organizations are reasonably good at gathering data on their users. But data often fails to communicate the frustrations and experiences of customers. A story can do that, and one of the best storytelling tools in business is the customer journey map. Think of the customer journey map as a poster pinned to the office wall. At a glance, people should be able to see the key touchpoints that a user passes through. It should remind them that the customer’s needs must always be at the forefront of their thinking.
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During the initial design process for your product, answers will come from brainstorming on the product and from execution at the highest level, with all necessary stakeholders (along with their egos). In this article, Chris Bank explains why defining your product matters and how to prepare and conduct creative exercises for kickoff meetings during the initial phase of product development.
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Web designers usually lose money on a project as a result of the client endlessly iterating on the design. After a few bad experiences, we avoid consulting with them. Unfortunately, this often makes interaction with the client even worse, so they interfere even more, creating a vicious cycle. But there is a way that enables you to produce outstanding design and maintain your profit margin! The answer lies in involving the client in the process, rather than excluding them. It involves collaborating with the client to produce a design. In this article, Paul Boag will show you how.
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Sometimes, despite your careful planning and best efforts, a project will fail. And preparing to deal with failure is as important as planning for success. The important thing to do when a project goes bad is learn from it. Once the dust has settled, sit down with your team and take an honest look at what went wrong. Own up to your own failings, and do what you can to make sure they do not arise again. Articles and tips on how to kick off a project right and build a long-term client relationship are helpful in this industry, but if you only focus on what to do when things go right, then you will be ill-prepared for when things get so off track that you are unable to complete a project.
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Workshops work really well to get everyone onboard with how to produce content. By involving as many people and key stakeholders as possible in these workshops, you can really underline people’s responsibilities, where they fit into the workflow and make it clear this process won’t happen overnight. In this article, James Deer shares the approach he developed to run content-planning workshops. While you will need to adapt the format to your scenario, you should be able to apply most of the steps.
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Dammed up inside our heads are creative waterfalls of fresh interactions, transitions, and animations. But how are we supposed to communicate them to our teams, our developers? How do we get them out of our heads? Through a game of charades? Not being able to “show” the interactions and animations that bring our designs to life is one of the common struggles plaguing our industry. Exacerbating the urgency of this challenge is the simple fact that we now design for screens that can be tapped, pinched, swiped, zoomed, and more.
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