When I started Clearleft in 2005, we were arguably the first UX agency in the UK. Sure there were folks practicing various elements of User Centered Design; there were dedicated research agencies, dedicated IA agencies, tons of visual design agencies and even folks partnering on CX. However few if any had bought these threads together under the guise of “User Experience Design” as our friends at Adaptive Path in the US had done a few years earlier.
Most industries have their own professional language — often described as “jargon” by the less generous amongst us. Some may point out how ironic it is that designers—who pride themselves in making things easy to understand—use language that deliberately obfuscates meaning. They’ll claim that this is done by gatekeepers attempting to shore up their positions in order to keep new entrants out. This may be true, but In the spirit of Occam's razor, I suspect there’s a much simpler (and less nefarious) explanation.
I’ve long believed that, rather than Heads, Directors and VPs of design being the pivotal team role, we actually need to focus on hiring more Lead Designers. In this article I attempt to explain what a Lead Designer is, what they do, and why they play such an important role in high performing teams.
I'm super interested in how the rise of automation and agentive technology may affect the role of the designer over the coming years. In this article I attempt to make sense of some of the current trends and outline one potential future (if we're not too careful).
The purpose of a portfolio site is simple: to showcase the skills you have to the people who might want them. As such I’m often surprised when I see folks who describe themselves as UX/UI designers, choose to focus their portfolio on the UI side of the equation. It feels to me that these people may be selling themselves short by only focusing on a fraction of their skill-set, but before I jump into details, let’s start with some caveats.
With disturbing regularity, my Twitter stream seems to explode with posts demonising commonly used, yet seemingly harmless design tools. These posts take great pains to document all the ways these tools have failed people in the past (while downplaying or ignoring situation where they may have helped).