Smart UX Process

We take on financial debt to enable the purchase of a house, a car, or an education long before we can afford it. We do so assuming that we will be able to make good on the loan, paying it back over time.

User Experience Debt is a very similar concept. Our products may acquire debt in the form of technical, functional, behavioral, and visual deficiencies through both responsible and irresponsible actions, and we must address that debt over time. If we don’t deal with UX debt successfully, we will eventually reach a state in which our products are so painful to use that even our existing customers will seek out better tools from our competitors.

Stop writing I.O.U.’s to your users. Explore the 15 primary sources of UX debt, both intentional and unintentional, and learn how to identify debt in your products. Then put in place a process by which your team can classify existing debt, prioritize it, and address it. Finally, establish practices for avoiding UX debt in the future.

A/B Testing is often misunderstood and feared by designers. How can you replace my training & judgment with cold, heartless data? We often fear what we don't know and understand.

Hear how one designer heard about A/B Testing, learned about it, did it, and learned to stop worrying and love it. Walk through the theory and see it in practice with specific real-world examples from Netflix's product experience.

Dark horse prototypes are ideas that are dark, odd, uncomfortable, and sometimes orthogonal to the context you are designing for. Research conducted at Stanford has shown that creating dark horse prototypes in addition to your normal design ideas helps keep the design space open a bit at a time that it naturally converges and leads to stronger results. Come learn what a dark horse prototype is and how to add it to your design process.