“A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.” So wrote John le Carré, the famed British spy novelist, in his 1977 novel The Honourable Schoolboy. It’s a sentiment that applies to international espionage, certainly—and also to a product team’s work as managers, makers, and designers of great digital products. A product team can be tempted to make decisions about priorities and functionality from the comfort of…
Tag: User Experience
The Web is Written
Think of the verbs we use when describing the work we do on digital products: develop, design, code, manage, test, release, launch, support. You’ll note, though, that we don’t often say that we write web sites or apps. “I write web sites” isn’t a sentence we hear nearly as often as, say, “I design web sites.” But writing well—that is, carefully choosing and assembling the words in our UI—is one…
Sketching as Work
Earlier this week I led a group of Product, Technology, and Experience pros through a lengthy session to plan some challenging work to unify a diverse product portfolio. Several weeks ago, another group and I planned ways to improve an important business challenge: increasing renewals for a critical product line. In both sessions, I asked the teams to do something that might have seemed frivolous: I asked them to draw…