There is a lot of stuff around our users’ life. All the way from the phone in their hands, culture, ideals, and up to the maximum values floating around in their surrounding world.
We as UX Designers focus really hard on creating delightful experiences for our users, and a lot of stuff must be done to achieve this goal. Research must be conducted, Personas and Journey maps created and Brainstorming, Prototypes, and Testing need to be performed too.
You can’t just pop your brilliant idea and stick it on the wall with a catchy phrase. If you aim to work the right way, you’ll have the need for all these data, which ultimately will allow you to get a better understanding and develop empathy for the users’ problems and their surrounding world. …
Killer ideas might not be what we thought
Design thinking is flawed. And by that I could not just mean the famous methodology with the same name, but since this is one of the main references in design theory, this critique might be a good fit to the whole designer mindset itself.
Let’s quickly review the design thinking approach. There are 3 core activities: inspiration, ideation and implementation.
Inspiration starts with a first immersion into the users’ problems and needs, identifying key players and defining the project scope and boundaries. This part requires a lot of research, where designers get to know the real user concerns, identifying patterns…
Yeah, such a strange word 🤔. But before trying to explain it, let’s add something dramatic.
I remember it was 2014. I was in my last year of college (Or at least that’s what I thought before what is coming in this brief story). I must admit it, back then I felt that I was the greatest-almighty-graphic-designer out there. Good grades and positive feedback from teachers and fellow aspiring designers were always there in my everyday life.
Then came to stage one of the greatest challenges in my life: “The Thesis”.📖
Nowadays, I feel grateful for my naivety and overconfidence. I believe that if I hadn’t been that airy back then, I wouldn’t even have dared…
Not your typical history class but a brief mind-blowing trip for new UX Designers & Researchers.
There is a lot of information about what mental models are, when and where to use them and why they are useful in UX research. But what about where they come from? Have you ever wondered who was the smart guy who thought it was a good idea to believe in such thing as a mental model? What’s inside this theory and why we use it in design?
I get it. This is another tricky question, but I gotta admit it, I love them. And I’m here to guide you through this mind-blowing trip. …
Nicolás Del Real
UX Designer from México. Enthusiastic front-end developer and philosophers failed attempt.
