VARIOUS RAMBLINGS
Journal
Writing and journaling have been a constant companion since high school. This writing is focused on things I've learned about leadership, UX, and sometimes other things.
The article explains how athenahealth identified and categorized UX debt in its Collector product, defining three types—quick wins, optimizations, and redesign efforts—based on scope and impact. It describes a structured process for cataloguing, prioritising, and tracking debt using JIRA for ready‑to‑work items and Trello for broader issues, aiming to create an inventory, improve workflows, and enhance user experience while aligning with product roadmaps.
A lean usability test report is a concise, templated document that guides teams through goal setting, protocol writing, findings synthesis, and recommendations, enabling quick planning, execution, and reporting of studies within a few pages instead of lengthy presentations.
Storytelling is a vital UX skill that helps teams explain, persuade, and align around design work by using clear structures, tones, and perspectives; focusing on human elements, concise data, and the appropriate story flavor improves communication, decision‑making, and project success.
Research at conferences offers valuable insights into user behavior and product workflows by providing direct access to diverse participants, but requires careful planning, clear goals, and effective note‑taking strategies. Key practices include defining research objectives, preparing a protocol, recording interviews, offering incentives, recruiting help, minimizing bulky equipment, and protecting personal time for reflection. When executed thoughtfully, conference research can yield rich, actionable data and strengthen user relationships.
A short-form creative brief, kept to one or two pages, helps teams align quickly by defining the design problem, constraints, goals, key personas, scenarios, principles, and optional milestones, making kickoff meetings more transparent and efficient while preventing delays and ensuring focused, user‑centered outcomes.
The MIT Designing for Health Conference took place at MIT Sloan on December 6, 2018. Here are some of my key takeaways.
We got together at the MITx DesignTech Summit to talk about the business of design. Here are my key takeaways.
Character sheets get the whole team involved in creating, validating, and describing personas without relying on tropes.
A key output of OOUX is the object map. In a recent project, we explored using the map directly with our user group.