Leadership
Richard Baker
Change Means Progress, Sometimes

Lately my team has been getting frustrated from the shifts and changes in their projects. New constraints, priority shifts, change in project goals, and so on. When it came down to it, the team expected to be able to follow a perfect design process, without shifts.

Change Means Progress, Sometimes
User Experience
Richard Baker
5 Tips to Improve Your UX Team

Building a great UX team is more than just hiring ‘better designers’. Even the best designers will fail if their work environment doesn’t set them up for success. Over the past decade of leading, building, and growing user experience teams, there are five key areas I focus on that result in noticeable and speedy improvements.

5 Tips to Improve Your UX Team
Conference
Richard Baker
Adobe 99U 2019 Recap
Adobe 99U 2019 Recap
Career, Management
Richard Baker
Schedule Time to Focus
Schedule Time to Focus
Management, Career
Richard Baker
Scaling Through Quality
Scaling Through Quality

Links

Links for Week 17, 2019

How a world-class design agency organizes files
Alex shares their striaght-forward process to ensure everyone stays aligned. The Incoming and Outgoing folders are a great idea.

Implementing user insights: how to get started in a single morning
Lauren Pope breaks down a fast-tracked approach to integrating user centric thinking into any design process.

Highlighting stakeholder and leadership misalignment
Maxim (@round) shared one of his go-to stakeholder interview quesitons. I always ask for measure of success, but never thought about asking about their leadership's measure.

Workshop exercise: How would you make your company obsolte
Richard Banfield (@RMBanfield) shared a novel workshop exercise to get leadership thinking about growth:

Links for Week 22, 2018

Questions to ask a struggling employee
14 great questions to use in your next 1-on-1 with a struggling employee (or anyone).

Kandinsky in Space
Fly through one of Kandinsky's paintings and experience it like never before.

Preventing burnout on your team
People drive culture...

Best performing problem solving teams
Cognitively divers and psychologically safe.

How to be be a great junior team member

  1. Ask lots of questions.
  2. Don’t fear mistakes, just admit them quickly.
  3. Don’t get attached to the results of your work.
  4. Be patient and understanding.
  5. Understand a big picture.

Great employees leaving great cultures
Great culture is more than saying '...we have a great culture.'.

Building a design driven culture
Understand the customer, build empathy in the organization, don't design in a vacuum, act quickly

Mosaiq—organizing research
Using Wordpress to share your team's design research.

Links for Week 4, 2018

Building New Organizational Models to Achieve True Digital Transformation
“People have been shown by Amazon, Google, and even Twitter, how easy things can be. So, they just expect things to work and to be relatively simple.”

Outline
A new (and beautiful) documentation tool. Looks promising.

The UX of AI
“If you aren’t aligned with a human need, you’re just going to build a very powerful system to address a very small—or perhaps nonexistent—problem.”

How to design An Innovation Culture
A webinar video of Alex Osterwalder (Strategyzer co-founder) and Dave Gray (XPLANE co-founder) talk about intentionally designing your corporate innovation culture.

Want To Build A Culture Of Innovation? Master The Design Critique
Successful design critiques is based on honesty and trust. It reminds me this tweet from John Maeda:

Links for Week 3, 2018

Design Studios, When Done Well, Change Organizations For The Better
Well-facilitated design studios [workshops] also focus more on the problem, less on solutions.

How I Teach
Last week I said to read anything Jon Kolko publishes. This week, he published a new and free book. Go. Read. Now. This book is for anyone who works with other people, in any capacity.

Future of Design in Start-Ups
Nothing too surprising here. Designers are increasingly transitioning from the agency to the enterprise. Skills will follow suite.

Adele—Repository of Design Systems Design Systems are extremely helpful as teams scale. This repository is one of the best I’ve seen.

Laws of UX
Lovely single-purpose site; fun just to view.

Choose An Amazing Boss. Role Is Secondary. I’ve been fortunate to have a number of supportive bosses. However, there is a difference between a supportable boss and an Amazing (enabling) boss.

Links for Week 2, 2018

A collection of Soviet Control Rooms
Some photos of beautiful, mid-century control rooms of power stations, control towers, and the like.

Inside One of America’s Last Pencil Factory
A fascinating look into the art of making pencils.

Dysfunctional Products Come from Dysfunctional Organizations
I’ve seen this situation play out time and time again. And here’s a little tip—do yourself a favor and read everything by Jon Kolko.

Workplace Hygiene in Sketch
Good rules for design teams to operate by.

How to Resolve Conflicts with a Remote Coworker
Great advice if you work with people, remote or not.