IDEO is one of the most well known and successful design consultancies in the world. But in recent days they’ve gotten pushback on Instagram for their record on diversity and the state of diversity in design in general. This is a critical conversation, and it’s fitting that IDEO would be…

The ongoing battle for design ownership often ignores the real consequences of making design decisions — There are a few ongoing debates in the world of digital design. Things like Should designers code?”, “What’s the value of design?”, “UX versus UI,” and, perhaps most fundamentally, “Is everyone a designer?” To get a taste for the flavor of that last one, you can step into this Twitter…

Why taking care of workers is good for business — Three years ago, I couldn’t stand for any period of time without my lower back seizing up. I had chronic nerve pain running from my left shoulder to my left wrist. It was bad enough that I couldn’t sleep. I was at least 20 pounds overweight and more out of…

Why you can’t compare the smartphone to books — We build a lot of technology and push it out into the world. When things go well, we rush to take credit for what we did. But when things go wrong, we hide our heads in the sand. This isn’t just about ignoring negative outcomes — it’s about maintaining the…

Your measure of success should focus on users, not the business — The process of user-centered design focuses a lot of attention on finding the right problem. There are many tools and processes that can be used to suss out user needs and motivations and boil it all down into clearly defined problems to be solved. But with all these tools at…

Designing for the “happy path” best-case scenario leaves our most vulnerable users on the margins — In our drive for speed, we have conditioned ourselves to ignore our most vulnerable users. We design for the happy path, and society pays the price. The happy path To create digital products, designers often start by developing a set of scenarios or use cases. These scenarios help determine the features, interactions, and…

The chance to make better choices with a nascent technology — Augmented reality (AR) is technology designed to enhance the physical world by integrating digital images into or on top of it. These composite experiences are often delivered through a heads-up display built into glasses or goggles, or in its current nascent form, via a smartphone camera. AR differs from VR…

Are we psychologically primed to focus on the wrong parts of our product? — In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Noble Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman discusses the psychological phenomenon of loss aversion, which he, along with Amos Tversky, first identified back in 1979. At its core, loss aversion refers to the tendency of the human brain to react more strongly to losses than…

To survive in a world of change, stop designing for the best-case scenario — In March of 2008, salmonella infiltrated the public water system of the town of Alamosa in southern Colorado. The resulting disease outbreak infected an estimated 1,300 people, over 14% of the town’s population. Of those infected, one person died and 20 more were hospitalized. The Alamosa outbreak was the second-largest…