Unlimited vacation is a perk that has been making waves in tech and startup circles. At first glance it sounds great: if we are interested in results, rather than effort, why do we ask employees to work set office hours and only allow them a set amount of vacation? Why not assign them their tasks … More Why unlimited vacation can be a double-edged sword
Including user experience in software development is now common practice in the development of consumer products, but many software development projects in the enterprise sector still fail to include it. Why is this?
Any organisation that has a significant number of developers is likely to consider creating a development toolkit at some point. Toolkits are intended to make development faster, by allowing development teams to share common elements, rather than building everything from scratch. They aid overall efficiency by avoiding different teams doing the same work; allowing developers … More 10 Characteristics of a good development toolkit
Prioritisation is simply the act of deciding which things are most important. We’ve all done it in one form or another and it doesn’t seem very complicated. Usually, we create a list and juggle the items around to put the most important ones at the top. Or if the list is long, we rate the … More High, High, High: Why prioritisation goes bad
Failure is not uncommon in the software world. At one level it can be small: software may be delivered late, have poor usability, or fail to provide key functionality. At the other extreme, whole projects can fail – scrapped after multiple delays and rising costs. There are many factors behind these failures, but I want … More The simple secret behind successful software projects
There are lots of different kinds of company out there, and many of them have a requirement for some form of custom software. This means that there is a vast array of environments that an Interaction Designer can work in. We frequently talk about the distinction between agency and client side. However, agencies vary widely … More The Business and Software Landscape
Design can operate at many levels within an organisation, with different benefits to bring in each arena. However, in practice, designers and user experience practitioners are often often stuck in a relatively narrow slice of the overall process. This is partly because management and other stakeholders have a limited view of what design and research … More Levels of Design
Most design projects are undertaken by a team of people and in many cases there are also multiple stakeholders. Designers are used to discussing requirements, brainstorming options, sketching ideas and generally working together to develop a solution. Project stakeholders usually have a very different background and bring to the table a very different way of … More Making a statement: how to control endless design discussions with stakeholders
Martin Colebourne 