Aurelius Podcast: Episode 13 with Andy Budd on Design Thinking, User Research Insights and Synthesis

Episode 13 highlights:

  • The beginnings of Clearleft
  • How the UX agency to client relationship has changed
  • Designing like a detective
  • Gathering the right evidence to do great UX design
  • The tools and application are of design thinking
  • How to go from research, synthesis and insights into actual design
  • Dangers of “research theater” and how to avoid them
  • Getting past the obvious solutions to create your most brilliant designs

read more… “Aurelius Podcast: Episode 13 with Andy Budd on Design Thinking, User Research Insights and Synthesis”

Aurelius Podcast: Episode 10 with Jeff Patton on Product Discovery and User Research

Episode 10 highlights:

  • What product discovery is and how to do it
  • The wrong way to do user research and how to avoid it
  • A process to make sure you’re building products and features that solve real problems
  • When product discovery starts and ends
  • 4 steps to conducting product discovery
  • The importance, and dangers, confidence level in design or product ideas

read more… “Aurelius Podcast: Episode 10 with Jeff Patton on Product Discovery and User Research”

Aurelius Podcast: Episode 9 with Melissa Perri on Product Management & User Research

Episode 9 highlights:

  • Melissa’s approach to product strategy
  • Setting good strategic goals for our product and user experiences
  • The difference between shipping features and shipping GOOD features
  • How to do user research to actually drive innovation
  • Case study examples from Melissa on how she used user research to increase user acquisition
  • Using product and UX goals to tie up into larger company vision and strategy

read more… “Aurelius Podcast: Episode 9 with Melissa Perri on Product Management & User Research”

Aurelius Podcast: Episode 15 with Indi Young discussing Empathy, User Research, Synthesis and Thinking Styles

Episode 15 highlights:

  • Non dominant thinking styles, diversity in product design and user research
  • Difference between problem space research and solutions research and why it matters
  • The concept of “thinking styles” in research and how to apply them in UX design
  • How machine learning and AI can create emergent experiences in the future
  • Different types of empathy (cognitive and emotional), what they are and how to use each one
  • A brilliant, tactical example of how to make sense of what you learn from user research

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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.

Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash

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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”