bizwords; buzzwords; & all that jazz:

My New Year’s Resolution for 2014 was to get more people started in User Experience (UX) Design. I posted one lesson every day in January, and hundreds of thousands of people came to learn!

Below you will find links to all 31 daily lessons.

Basic UX Principles: How to get started

The following list isn’t everything you can learn in UX. It’s a quick overview, so you can go from zero-to-hero as quickly as possible. You will get a practical taste of all the big parts of UX, and a sense of where you need to learn more. The order of the lessons follows a real-life UX process (more or less) so you can apply these ideas as-you-go. Each lesson also stands alone, so feel free to bookmark them as a reference!

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Introduction & Key Ideas

#01 — What is UX?

#02 — User Goals & Business Goals

#03 — The 5 Main Ingredients of UX

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How to Understand Users

#04 — What is User Research?

#05 — How to Ask People Questions

#06 — Creating User Profiles

#07 — Designing for Devices

#08 — Design Patterns

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Information Architecture

#09 — What is Information Architecture?

#10 — User Stories & Types of Information Architecture

#11 — What is a Wireframe?

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Visual Design Principles

#12 — Visual Weight, Contrast & Depth

#13 — Colour

#14 — Repetition & Pattern-Breaking

#15 — Line Tension & Edge Tension

#16 — Alignment & Proximity

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Functional Layout Design

#17 — Z-Pattern, F-Pattern, and Visual Hierarchy

#18 — Browsing vs. Searching vs. Discovery

#19 — Page Framework

#20 — The Fold, Images, & Headlines

#21 — The Axis of Interaction

#22 — Forms

#23 — Calls-to-Action, Instructions & Labels

#24 — Primary & Secondary Buttons

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User Psychology

#25 — Conditioning

#26 — Persuasion

#27 — How Experience Changes Experience

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Designing with Data

#28 — What is Data?

#29 — Summary Statistics

#30 — Graph Shapes

#31 — A/B Tests

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All done? There is a sequel to this course: 

UX Crash Course: User Psychology

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If you know someone else who wants to learn UX, please share!

If this is how you discovered my blog, it doesn’t stop here! I post a lot of awesome shit about UX, design, persuasion, and human behaviour. It’s a lot easier than hunting for links on your own!

For Every ‘Yes’ Man at Work, There’s a ‘No’ Woman - NYmag.com

“‘Back in 2010, Eric and I created an internal class for Google managers,’ says Rosenberg. 'The class slides all read 'Google confidential’ until an employee suggested we uphold the spirit of openness and share them with the world. This book codifies the recipe for our secret sauce: how Google innovates and how it empowers employees to succeed.’”

Launched in 2014’s bestselling book Storyscaping, our strategic approach has continued to fuel powerful thinking about brands and experiences at the intersection of story and technology. Our Storyscaping approach is a way of looking at the world that we have refined into a powerful model for working with brands, people, and technology. Storyscaping’s principles guide how we create worlds, and we have had the opportunity to create some great ones in a huge range of sectors this past year. Born from our unique expertise in technology and storytelling, we are excited by the results that it has helped us, and our clients, achieve.

Summary of points (usual caveats about taking advice without context, etc et all applies):

Move of enterprise software to the cloud drives down distribution and sales costs dramatically.

Extension of the point above is that you can go international way earlier if you make your product super accessible.

Mobile devices mean enterprise sales can be a lot more user-led

There are two moments of opportunity where a technology revolution will happen in enterprise. The first is when raw materials change (e.g. cost of computing goes down; businesses let people use it on demand). Second is that changing environments, or new experiences (e.g. AirBnB, Uber) force incumbents to demand new technology to deal.

Spot new fundamental trends, new enabling technologies (though I wonder if this is really what they did).

Start naturally small. Build a product that will slip in the gaps of existing products. In the example of Zen Payroll, don’t pick the whole problem, pick the smallest one and solve that, and that grow larger.

Look for asymmetries. Either start by offering something that a larger competitor can’t offer because it would go against their strategy of having a suite (therefore cannibalising some other offering they have) or doing something really they really can’t afford to do by nature of their business model.

Listen to customers but don’t build exactly what they’re telling you.

Modularise, don’t customise. Build like you’re a consumer product company. Target the user, because it should be able to sell itself (not that you don’t need sales people, just that it’s dumb to ignore the fact that products can enter companies through the consumer route as well).