Category Archives: design

Who Runs The World? Women in Design at the Designer Fund Event

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In December, I had the pleasure of joining a group of amazing speakers at the Designer Fund “Women in Design” event.

The Designer Fund has published a recap of the event with audio and slide links, and I recommend you check it out. The presentations are filled with great stories, smart insights, warmth and humor. Every speaker showed the passion and courage that are key to doing great design work and loving what you do. Two other summaries are here: this Fast Company article and an article on The Paly Voice by Kate Apostolou.

At the event, I spoke on a topic that seems to never go away, and is particularly hot right now: How to be successful in a business with a gender imbalance. The recent conversation about whether Silicon Valley is a meritocracy has helped to crystalize my thinking on the issue. (For backstory, see posts like this one by Eric Reis, the CNN documentary Black in America and responses such as this from Vivek Wadha.)

It doesn’t matter whether there is bias in the Valley. Even just the threat of bias is enough to cause women to leave the field, to avoid putting themselves out there at conferences and in the media, and to perform below their actual capabilities. This is a well-documented social phenomenon called Stereotype Threat.

So how can women succeed? Be confident. Believe that you (women) are up to the challenge that a possibly biased environment would present. Then go forward and Run The World (girls). Here’s my talk and the related audio:

Women in Tech (& design)

 

If you have a chance to attend a Designer Fund event, do it! The community is smart, engaged and passionate. It was one of the most exciting events I’ve been to in the past few years.

Sketching with the LUXr Cohort {and a neat-o download}

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Last week at the Lean UX Residency, we hosted the awesome Rachel Glaves: UX practitioner, Interaction Designer and Sketching Goddess. She introduced a handful of simple techniques that took our lean startup sketching skills to new heights.

Rachel started us out by covering key concepts for using sketching as a way to clearly communicate ideas and interactions.

Why do we sketch?

  • To generate new ideas: A quick way to get a lot of ideas out into the world
  • To figure out how an idea works: See context, interactions & variables
  • To communicate ideas to other people: Present & talk about ideas that aren’t final yet

She also gave the group a Neuroscience Bonus: Using the paper as a thought-holding area: Our prefrontal cortex can only hold a certain number of ideas at the same time. When we use paper, we free up valuable brainpower for comparing, prioritizing & deciding. (If you’re a fellow neuroscience geek, you’ll love Your Brain At Work by David Rock.)

In fact, some of the info was so fabulous we wanted it as a handout…which we’re happy to share for your downloading pleasure (thanks, Rachel!)

{ Sketching for Lean UX – Handout }

As a final activity, she assigned a set of constraints and each of us used our newly-acquired skills to sketch out an interface. With only 10 minutes, it was rapid-fire sketching for sure. Then we stuck them all up on the wall for a review.

It was fascinating to see the different challenges that people addressed, and it was an eye-opener to pinpoint the simple touches that transform a sketch from a rough set of lines into a fully communicative sketch.

 

 

 

 

 

More about Rachel
Rachel Glaves is an interaction designer, UX practitioner and visual communicator based in Seattle, WA. Rachel has worked as a consultant to organizations big and small, early-stage and enterprise. She’s passionate about creating products that deliver great user experiences. And she’s one hell of a sketcher. You can follow her on twitter -> @glaves.

Tokyo Startup Scene Is Heating Up

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Last week, Jason and I went to Tokyo to do a one-day workshop for 120 entrepreneurs, hosted by the Open Network Lab at Digital Garage. If you’re not familiar, DG  was founded by well known angel investor Joi Ito. Today Digital Garage is the hub of startup action in Tokyo. The company provides venture investment, operational support for American imports like Twitter, and incubator services for seed-stage startups.

We were surprised to learn that Tokyo has a voracious appetite for Lean Startup and UX thinking. We initially set up the workshop for 80 people. When it sold out quickly, we upped the capacity to 100. When that sold out, we knew it was going to be a very interesting day!

In the end, we had about 120 people in the room for a hands-on Lean User Experience all-day workshop.

You’d expect, by reputation, that the Japanese startup community would be reticent—a little unwilling to dive into the radically collaborative, selectively uncontrolled Lean UX process that we advocate. Turns out, you’d be wrong.

Throughout the day, we used sketching, collaborative critique, dot voting, and assorted other techniques. Participants dove into the mock customer development interviews and translated their learnings into new product ideas. It was an active, engaged, crowd filled with people I’d love to work with. Having simultaneous translators helped (arigato gosaimas!).

Most impressive was the gratitude that participants expressed for our visit to Tokyo. We’ll be going back and heading on to other countries. In the next several months, LUXr coaches will be visiting Jakarta, Singapore, Chile, Mexico…keep an eye out for announcements.

If you’re anywhere in the world and want to bring a LUXr workshop, please drop us a note.

Phin on Design = !!!

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Fantastic post by @phineasb this morning about the role of design in startups. This paragraph is one of the smartest pieces of writing on the subject that I’ve seen.

At the core, design is an inductive language, moving from individual need to possibility and every start-up should have a native speaker on their leadership team. Designers listen to individuals and identify simple narratives. Problem solving is driven by insights and understanding, product testing through rapid prototyping and iteration, iteration, iteration. The agile principles of the lean start-up are key tenants of a great design process and this confluence makes me believe designers will be the most critical talent shortage for start-ups within the next 12-18 months.

You can read the whole post here.