Design Thinking: A Brief History

You could say the basic principles of Design Thinking have always been around. It was these basic principles that early humans built tools and drew on cave walls. It required observation, experimentation and prototyping. Learning from each iteration and evolving the design and our evolution as a species. Just as is does today. In his … Read more

The Right Color Palette for Data Visualization

While visually appealing (harmonious) color palettes are easy to come by these days, finding the right color palette for data visualizations is challenging. Things are made more difficult, as we need to convey information across thousands of unique data sets in many different types of visualization layouts. And then there are issues like accessibility, enough … Read more

Design and Data Science: Creating Meaningful Experiences in the Machine Learning Era

With the advance of machine learning and “artificial intelligence” (AI), it has become the responsibility of both designers and data scientists to understand how to shape experiences that improve lives. As Greg Borenstein argues in Power to the People: How One Unknown Group of Researchers Holds the Key to Using AI to Solve Real Human Problems: … Read more

The Partnership Between Designers and Data Scientists

From Experience Design in the Machine Learning Era, Fabien Girardin shares that with a behavioral data-driven experiences, we exploit thick data, the qualitative information that provides insights on people’s lives, big data from the aggregated behavioral data of millions of people and the small data that each individual generates. Traditionally, designers focus on defining the experience of the service, feature or … Read more

The New Relation Between Humans and Machines

“The experiences powered by machine learning are not linear or based on static business and design rules. They evolve according to human behaviors with constantly updating models fed by streams of data. Each product or service becomes almost like a living, breathing thing. Or as people at Google would say: ‘It’s a different kind of … Read more

Experience Design Principles for Machine Learning Solutions

“Nowadays, the design of many digital services does not only rely on data manipulation and information design but also on systems that learn from their users.” – Fabien Girardin, Experience Design in the Machine Learning Era Behavioral data – human interactions (transactions) with systems – is fed as context to algorithms that generates knowledge. An … Read more

Easy to Use: Icons

Ever visit a website or store or see a sign in a public space that you had no idea what the icon meant? There are a lot of reasons for that. One, of course is the ethnocentric aspect – we know what we know based on our prior experiences. So, if the image of the … Read more

Calm Technology

The terms “calm computing” and “calm technology” were coined in 1995 by PARC Researchers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in reaction to the increasing complexities that information technologies were creating. He felt that the promise of computing systems was that they might “simplify complexities, not introduce new ones.” Principles of Calm Technology Technology should require the smallest possible … Read more

Jeanne Bliss’s Five CX Competencies Transform Your Experience

Jeanne Bliss shares with us in her post Five CX Competencies Transform Your Experience: CUSTOMERS AS ASSETS Your focus is to get leaders to make a defining performance metric – the growth or loss of your customer base. The purpose is to shift to a simple understanding – knowing what customers actually did to impact … Read more

Service Blueprints – Going Beyond Customer Journey Maps

Where customer journey maps define your customers – prospects through advocates – touch points with your brand, products and services; service blueprints define the the behind-the-scenes people, processes and technology that supports that journey. Where creating a customer journey maps requires you to “walk in the shoes” of your customer and see your organization through … Read more

The Power of Product Thinking

In his blog post Why Product Thinking is the next big thing in UX Design: Life’s too short to build something nobody wants… Nikkel Blaase shares: “When thinking of User Experience, we often think of a simple, beautiful, and easy to use feature-set of a product, that makes the user’s life easier. But as a … Read more

A Focus on User Experience Increased Conversions by 350%

  Skinit was ranked #25 by Forbes in 2011 as a Most Promising Company. They make personalized adhesive logos and other artwork for consumers to stick onto cell phones, laptops, digital cameras and other electronic gadgets with distribution partners that include Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft and works with sports teams and entertainment firms like Disney to … Read more