Design & Strategy Blog

I recently read the excellent book on collaborative space design Make Space. In the book the author lists d.school's "mindsets" - design attitudes that they try and centre all design activities around. I thought I might see if I can come up with a … [Read more...]

Reading Smashing Magazine's recent article How to recruit a UX designer provoked me to share a problem I've come across as I'm sure many who brand themselves as a "UX designer" do. We do ourselves a disservice by labelling ourselves under such a … [Read more...]

The other day I was reflecting on previous employment experiences and during that reflection I let loose on Twitter with some rather harshly-worded criticisms. I stand by those statements but I did feel to expand upon the topic and incorporate into … [Read more...]

There is no such concept of a homogeneous user experience designer. Identifying as a "user experience designer" is more or less useless to peers, clients or employers and only loosely associates you with the underlying principles of evidence-based … [Read more...]

I have an idea for a dual slider specifically for setting budget in a faceted search form based on the jQuery UI Slider control but logarithmic instead of linear. The hypothesis is that people with a low budget would want more granular control over … [Read more...]

This book is essential reading for executives, managers, strategists, analysts and design thinkers. Strategy theory can be a dry topic but this book is easy to read with useful diagrams that help explain the different concepts. It offers an objective … [Read more...]

The chapter It's Wrong to be Right from Paul Arden's book It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be: Being right is based upon knowledge and experience and is often provable. Knowledge comes from the past, so it's safe. It is also … [Read more...]

An article I wrote for our company blog at LeftClick: When we talk to our customers about social media we always try to steer the discussion towards their business strategy and how a social media strategy may (or may not) support their ultimate … [Read more...]

This blog post was written in two parts although published at the same time. The first part was written the day before I attended a Christchurch City Council Share an Idea workshop and then my thoughts after the workshop. This has been done in order … [Read more...]

I like this quote from Heather M.A. Fraser who appears in Thomas Lockwood's collection of essays Design Thinking: A company that views design thinking not as a one-shot vaccination but rather as an ongoing fitness program for its organisation will … [Read more...]