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My blog is packed with articles on UX, design and development work, including career guidance and navigating tough office politics.
My free books, guidebooks + cheat sheets deliver simple, powerful tools to help you give great UX + UI design, no matter what you’re working on.
Here’s what’s new on the blog.
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Friends, I don’t take a second of any of this for granted. My life and my career — every part of it — is made possible by you. And if I’m honest, I think I do a fairly lousy job of communicating on a regular basis just how much that means to me. So as we hit our...
A word on ridiculous workloads and deadlines.
This is something I shared via email yesterday with a young lady I'm coaching, and I thought it might be useful to some of you here. The situation she was facing was a ridiculous ask with an equally ridiculous deadline: a clickable hi-fidelity prototype consisting of...
Time for Change. NOW.
I’ll admit up front that this is really a rant with no direction. But it’s something that’s been eating at me for the past week. And when anything sticks with me that long, I know there’s something that matters buried within. So maybe this is nothing more than...
The question everyone looking at your UX portfolio is REALLY asking
I’d like to take you back in time for a minute — back to 1989, to be exact. The place is Kent State University, where I studied Graphic Design in one of the toughest programs in the country. And you need a little backstory on that to fully appreciate what I’m about to...
Thoughts on the New Year: you have all you need.
Friends, I’d like to share a few thoughts on the coming New Year, and a little UX career advice I hope is helpful. A few days back I answered a question in my Private Facebook Group, where a young man asked what he could do to prepare for a second round design...
Cut the bullshit: it’s time to end the tyranny of UX terminology.
Here's a conversation I was party to earlier today, between the VP of Product and an in-house UX lead: UX: “So what we really need to do is institute DesignOps. We need to put together a DesignOps strategy.” VP: “A what strategy?” UX: “DesignOps.” VP: “What the hell...
Catch the latest episodes of the Making UX Work podcast.
Here are my latest keynote speeches and videos.
Let’s Talk UX #3 with Joe Natoli at Give Good UX
HOW Design Live Keynote: 5 Rules for UX Disruption
The missing link in your UX work: The UX Value Loop (Ladies that UX, Canada)
Download my latest UX guidebooks + cheat sheets.
UX Audit Workbook: a guide for evaluating sites, apps + systems *FREE*
When a product already exists and needs to be updated or reimagined, the UX Audit is your best friend in the world.
Casting a critical eye to everything from content to labeling to navigation to layout and well beyond is always the first thing you should do.
Before anyone comes up with a wish list of new features and functions. Before any design or prototyping exploration happens.
Think first. Design next.
This workbook is a ready guide to evaluating the User Experience of any digital product that’ll help light the way to UX improvement.
User Interview Cheat Sheet: questions to ask B2B and B2C users *FREE*
Asking the right questions starts with the actual form of the questions you ask. Along with having good reasons for asking them in the first place.
Are there other questions you can ask? Sure — hundreds, in fact. But in the majority of circumstances, no one has the time (or the budget) to ask or answer all of them.
So I’ve learned to focus on the questions that deliver the most valuable information back to the team. Questions that focus on the underlying causes of most UX problems. That’s what you’ll find in this cheat sheet.
I hope this helps you uncover great insights.
Value Made Visible: timeless principles for great UI design *FREE download*
I was first exposed to the principles you’ll find here more than 30 years ago. We didn’t even call it UX then, by the way — the term didn’t exist. We just called it design.
I started out as a print-based designer, and all I really did when I moved to UI design and UX work a few years later was to apply these same principles of good design that I was taught, and which I used for print work.
These same rules governed every design project I’ve ever undertaken — and that’s thousands of them.
As I think you’ll see here, trends come and go — but anything that’s worthwhile has a very long shelf life.