Process: Envisioning

This is an excerpt from Chapter 9 of Chris Risdon and Patrick Quattlebaum’s new book Orchestrating Experiences: Collaborative Design for Complexity. 2018, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 9: Crafting a Tangible Vision

When you work in a small business, such as a startup, you can get everyone to play off the same sheet of music more easily. The larger your organization, however, the greater the challenge of understanding the end-to-end experiences you want to enable and why. Hierarchy, functional silos, and distributed teams create communication and collaboration barriers. Strategy is distributed in slides with terse bullet points that get interpreted in multiple ways. The vision for the end-to-end experience is lost in a sea of business objectives, channel priorities, and operational requirements. The result: painful dissonance when the dream was a beautifully orchestrated experience.

This chapter is about working with others to craft a tangible vision for your product or service—a North Star. These approaches will help your organization embrace a shared destiny and collaboratively create the conditions for better end-to-end experiences. Read More

This is a sample chapter from the book Communicating the UX Vision: 13 Anti-Patterns That Block Good Ideas, by Martina Schell and James O’Brien. 2015 Morgan Kaufmann.

Chapter 16: Group Design Techniques

To get you started with group design workshop formats, we have collected our most-used techniques for building better products and services with the whole team. There are hundreds of great workshop formats that could easily fill another book, so this is just a small selection of group design formats that we use most often in our day-to-day design practices.

Facilitating a group can be challenging and mentally exhausting. If you are new to facilitation, start small and find a partner who can support you—another member of your creative group can be a great backup or give you the ability to split the group into two for some tasks, so you can concentrate on a smaller number of people. Read More

This is an excerpt from Mona Patel’s new book, Reframe: Shift the Way You Work, Innovate, and Think. 2015 Lioncrest Publishing.

Excerpt from Chapter 7: The Reframework: Just Do WIT

Why isn’t innovation happening? Why does your business have user experience issues? Why aren’t customers in love with your brand? I believe it is because the people on your team, including you, are preventing it from happening. The problems are poorly defined.

People have closed, biased perspectives and are not seeing the problem or opportunity space clearly. There’s not enough time spent and respect given to exploration, ideation, creativity, and the harder parts of the design process including evaluating, refining, and even failing.

This all changes with reframing. Designing a new frame around the same circumstances allows new perspectives and ideas to emerge. Constantly seeing things with a new frame allows all problems to feel solvable and become opportunities for creative problem solving. Read More