Why The Best Design and Product Teams Decide What, Then How

Creating an awesome design, product and experience is hard work. Making the RIGHT design, product or experience is even harder. The smartest teams first figure out the “What” before they decide the “How”.

Whether you’re designing a new product or experience, or improving an existing one, you have to first figure out What you’re making before you can effectively execute the How.

Defining and agreeing on What you’re doing first gives everyone much better clarity to focus on executing How to get it done.

read more… “Why The Best Design and Product Teams Decide What, Then How”

Inside Aurelius – 002 with Joseph Szczesniak and Zack Naylor

iA002 episode highlights:

  • The technology stack that we built Aurelius with and how it’s evolved over time
  • Understanding common development terms to better communicate design ideas
  • An inside look at how Joseph and Zack make decisions about the product and the company
  • Behind the scenes views and opinions on making technology upgrades and feature prioritizations
  • How we build Aurelius like Wyatt Earp

Aurelius Podcast: Episode 20 with Aarron Walter on UX Organization Models, DesignOps and User Research

Episode 20 highlights:

  • What does a high functioning design team look like and how are they organized?
  • The three types of successful enterprise UX organization models
  • How companies like Target, Spotify, Netflix, Google and more are doing designops and great UX design at scale
  • Creating and sharing user research findings across your organization

read more… “Aurelius Podcast: Episode 20 with Aarron Walter on UX Organization Models, DesignOps and User Research”

People Are the Secret to Great Products

First who, then what. That’s the popular mantra to building massively successful and long-lasting companies. The same is true for crafting beautifully designed products and experiences. You may look to tools and processes for the secret to building a great product and user experience but in the end, the secret is people. Knowing who you are designing and building for and having a team who cares about helping those people will give you the greatest chance of success.

read more… “People Are the Secret to Great Products”

Inside Aurelius: Episode 001 with co-founders Zack Naylor and Joseph Szczesniak

In our very first episode of Inside Aurelius, we discuss a number of topics with highlights including:

  • Why we made Aurelius v2 and how we got there
  • How we used user research and customer feedback to completely re-design and re-develop our product and company focus
  • UX design, science and art
  • How Joseph, our CTO took an interest in UX as a developer and how UX can enrich a developers work and satisfaction
  • How and why developers should participate and have a stake in user research

You Don’t Need More User Research

Don’t freak out, but just hear me out. It’s very likely that you don’t need more user research but rather, you need to be getting more out of the user research you already did.

Spending more quality time with the data and insights you collect is one of the biggest challenges in our industry, particularly if you’re already doing user research regularly. Think about it, when was the last time you honestly felt that you spent enough time really analyzing and synthesizing (read…”figuring out what you learned) from the data and information you gathered from a research study?

read more… “You Don’t Need More User Research”

Aurelius Podcast: Episode 18 with Patrick Campbell on Customer Development, User Research for Pricing and Using Data for Better Decisions

Episode 18 highlights:

  • How user research directly applies to making businesses more successful
  • Doing customer research to inform pricing strategy
  • Figuring out what is most valuable to your customers
  • Using customer research to develop buyer personas
  • How you’re probably doing surveys wrong and how to fix that
  • Helping people understand what you learned from user research and put it to use
  • Potential pitfalls of building and using personas and how you can avoid them

read more… “Aurelius Podcast: Episode 18 with Patrick Campbell on Customer Development, User Research for Pricing and Using Data for Better Decisions”

Aurelius Podcast: Episode 12 with Tomer Sharon on Polaris from WeWork, UX Nuggets and Key Insights and ResearchOps

Episode 12 highlights:

  • Tomer Sharon’s version of a user research repository tool at WeWork, Polaris
  • Tomer Sharon on Democratizing UX
  • What is user research
  • Research nuggets and key insights, what they are and how to create them
  • How to do user research the right way
  • What questions can user research answer
  • Difference between finding out what customer want vs what they need

read more… “Aurelius Podcast: Episode 12 with Tomer Sharon on Polaris from WeWork, UX Nuggets and Key Insights and ResearchOps”

Aurelius Podcast: Episode 11 with Christina Wodtke on OKRs and User Research

Episode 11 highlights:

  • Why understanding a business model is critical for designers

  • Using design to do more than make a great interface or a sexy advertisement

  • Humanizing business and letting design/design thinking drive how business gets done

  • What OKRs are, where they’re used and how to do them

  • How Christina has used OKRs for both business and her own life

  • Embracing business metrics as designers

  • How you can be more innovative than Steve Jobs 
  • 
Tools and techniques for looking at your customer feedback and research insights to get beyond your assumptions



read more… “Aurelius Podcast: Episode 11 with Christina Wodtke on OKRs and User Research”

Aurelius Podcast: Episode 6 with Peter Merholz on Product & Design Strategy

Episode 6 highlights:

  • Some history of Adaptive Path and how they got into design and product strategy
  • Pitfalls to avoid when making a product and design strategy
  • How to be more than a UX design “stylist” or “executionist”
  • The role of UX and design in business strategy
  • Differences between UX and product management
  • Design like a lawyer and get everyone on board with your decisions and recommendations

read more… “Aurelius Podcast: Episode 6 with Peter Merholz on Product & Design Strategy”