The Three Lies of UXD

Thinking about design in terms of the exchange of value, is the path to thinking about the whole problem. Even if a designer is making choices about a small part, they should be thinking about the whole.

 Otherwise, they risk contributing to a beautiful experience that exploits people,...

• Professional conversations are dominated by low-level arguments about terminology and artifacts rather than outcomes
• There is pressure to turn every piece of information into a measurement and scale it
• Despite everything that is known about the principles of good design, orga...

Designers are laboring under defective job descriptions and a limiting framing of the field.

As a result, the outcomes we claim to be able to accomplish through design—business success by way of understanding and serving real human needs—aren’t happening as much as they sh...

Because so much value inheres in a digital intermediary, the interface/interaction design is the business. Any designer only thinking of the customer or user experience is doing at most a third of the job.

 The interaction not...

People who work with complex information use a lot of diagrams and models in their work. Models go wrong when they have a surfeit of detail or stylistic embellishments, both impediments to understanding that arise from their creator’s anxiety about demonstrating expertise.

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Business culture and design culture are planets with different atmospheres. Business suffocates in the absence of positive numbers. Design subsists on subjective human experience.

Value to the user is qualitative. Value to the business is quantitative. In order to make holi...

The fundamental challenge we are up against is that doing the right thing well is generally more expensive and time-consuming than doing the least you can get away with and figuring out how to defend it.

For example, the Lean methodology and the Minimum Viable Product technique are supp...