As designers, our purpose should be to design easy-to-use solutions, that don’t require expert users
When I talked to Anja Saabye, she brought up how everyone is busy these days and how time is the limited resource required to move things forward. This calls for solutions that require less effort and ideally no training.
In her view, we can’t expect that customers know everything, yet as she said, too many people who work with user experience forget this great responsibility and place a great burden on their users.
Anja is Head of UX and Product Design, Senior Manager at Universal Robots, where she has been a part of growing the design team. She’s been there for almost 2 years following an extensive agency background and lives privately in Odense, Denmark.
Read moreHow we build digital solutions has fundamentally changed in the past few years and this also has huge implications for marketing. To just mention a few of the new arrivals impacting marketing, there’s citizen developers, jamstack, no-code tools and then there’s the headless trend enabling faster and more secure websites while also separating content from presentation.
While many IT analysts, vendors, agencies and also quite a few IT departments have jumped on these emerging trends, marketing has been left catching up while looking at an overcrowded and confusing list of MarTech vendors.
Read more“The most important thing in diversity & inclusion is to speak less and do more”
It is hard to disagree with the impactful opening line by Chris Hovde in our recent member call, but how do you actually take diversity and inclusion to the next level?
Chris is a diversity lead at the award-winning Swedish multinational telecommunications company Telia. They have been crowned as the most family-friendly workplace and as a rainbow hero. It’s been a multi-year journey and as Chris said, they are not done yet.
Read moreUsing the presentation title “Strategic creativity in a chaotic world” Hannah Gutkauf travelled to the famous tech fest SXSW in Austin, Texas back in March and gave a talk framed around the Metaverse, but really about all emerging technology at the moment, be it AI, XR or data science.
Working with strategy creativity in a chaotic world is also a fitting title for Hannah’s job as Global Partner & Head of Emerging Tech at the Copenhagen offices of design services firm Manyone.
Hannah is originally from Vienna, studied at the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology and before joining the agency world, she worked in luxury fashion and also studied tech at the IT University of Copenhagen. Hannah is a self-proclaimed creative digital technologist and also our expert of the month.
Read moreAs the Head of Design at telecommunications conglomerate Verizon in New York City, Richard Dalton leads a sizable team of 600 designers working at the forefront of Verizon's digital transformation. They aim to create exquisite experiences for their customers, but how do they do it?
In a recent member call, Richard offered a brief and informal Q&A session, where he covered DesignOps, strengthening the design muscle and some of the recent design trends.
Read moreHow do we create web pages from the lens of sustainability and how do we measure the carbon footprint of our digital presence?
At UK-based website governance vendor Little Forest, Managing Director Gavin Colborne and his team are working on a new open source project which will introduce a "Sustainability Score" for websites.
As he said in our recent member call:
“Similar to Google Lighthouse scores for accessibility, SEO and performance, the time has come to also be serious about sustainability as a digital leader.”
Read moreIn his 2020 book 'World Wide Waste', Gerry McGovern shares how to achieve digital growth in environmentally friendly ways.
Gerry McGovern built his career on helping large organisations deliver a better digital customer experience. When reviewing his career, Gerry realised that his obsession with simplification could also benefit the environment, which led him to write World Wide Waste, a book about how digital is killing our planet and what we can do about it.
Read moreHow do you identify and remove the barriers to strong, effective content work?
This is the focus of Rachel McConnell’s recent book 'Leading Content Design', which shares how to create common standards, improve collaboration, iron out wrinkles in the design process, and build advocacy—so you can lead your team with impact.
Rachel works as Head of UX content at Flo, a women’s health app and was previously in various content roles at BT. In a recent member call, she shared her thinking behind the work and introduced us to her work on content operations.
Read moreAmazon has been changing how we shop online for years and every move of the online marketplace giant seems to have everyone’s attention. But why is that? And what is it that makes Amazon special?
In a recent member conference call, Jeppe Hamming, Head of Marketplaces, Amazon specialist and Partner in the Danish agency, Nørgård Mikkelsen dived into how Amazon does business and what that means for businesses looking to sell their goods via the platform. He also shared key insights into how you succeed on Amazon based on his vast experience onboarding and optimising the Amazon presence of multiple large enterprises.
Read moreIf you want to validate an idea or wondering how something works, it is almost always a good idea to ask the customer, but response rates are generally down on all surveys. Bad surveys can both stress your customers and alienate them.
In her recent book 'Surveys That Work', UK-based forms expert Caroline Jarrett explains a seven-step process for designing, running, and reporting on a survey that gets accurate results. In a no-nonsense style with plenty of examples about real-world compromises, the book focuses on reducing the errors that make up Total Survey Error—a key concept in survey methodology.
Read moreCan you actually make mass emails popular? According to Ashley Budd from Cornell University’s alumni engagement and fundraising division, she’s done just that by fundamentally changing the university’s approach to newsletters and call to action emails.
Her strategies have boosted open and click through rates far above industry standards. In a recent member call, she shared samples of what makes her emails so popular.
Read moreThe subject line of the very first edition of the New Thinking newsletter by Gerry McGovern was ‘Massively parallel societies’ and opened like this:
Language is the invention of a co-operative society, and we wouldn’t be where we are today if we hadn’t co-operated.
This was on June 24, 1996 and Gerry wrote about how multimedia and the Internet would hopefully help us realize again that we are nothing without each other.
Since then his monthly newsletter has gained traction and readers around the world, including yours truly and he’s kept doing it now with a weekly dose of provocative and thoughtful insights.
Besides his newsletter, Gerry is perhaps even more known as the inventor of the Top Task framework, the author of several books and his relentless focus on helping organizations become more customer centric on the Web.
Recently his focus has shifted to sustainability with his most recent book titled World Wide Waste. Gerry is based in Ireland and also our expert of the month.
Read moreWould you like flexible working hours, working from home when you want to, unlimited vacation and no more uncomfortable salary negotiations? Or perhaps it sounds too good to be true?
Our Frankfurt-based member byte5 has been living out these elements since before the pandemic with a specific no-pain focus. It has helped shape their company culture, but what is the secret and how has it really changed work?
byte5 works on business-critical web projects, in particular based on Laravel and also using other tools like Umbraco. Their radical approach to work has been featured by Handelsblatt, FAZ and other notable German news outlets.
Read moreThe voice story still has three leading roles: Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Bixby, but according to Jake DiMare at Voicify, the plot is quickly expanding to include so much more.
The early voice app wave laid the groundwork with relatively simple brand experiences deployed in walled-garden ecosystems. Now, brands imagine far more valuable conversational experiences driven by domain-trained AI, custom voices, deeper integration, and a familiar build once/deploy anywhere strategy.
In a recent member conference call, Jake DiMare shared a few examples demonstrating how yesterday's voice apps are becoming tomorrow's conversational custom assistants and unpack what's driving these changes.
Read moreChoosing an Intranet. The project that makes you feel as if you're on a five-year hamster wheel. Is there a better way?
Brian Tomlinson at Hamburg-based real estate firm Engel & Völkers has spent the last few years trying to find a modern, best in class intranet solution that avoids the cyclical hell that we all want to avoid - and has managed to learn a thing or two along the way.
In a recent member conference call, he went through his process for finding and selecting a solution. Everything from identifying the pain points to be fixed to ensuring it has all of the features that you need and finally selling it to the people who hold the purse strings.
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