Our talented staff creates content for national publications like UX Matters and Intranets Magazine. We are constantly striving to provide the public with sound usability advice and innovative design ideas to cement our standing as thought leaders in our industry.

<em>Article Published on uxmatters.com<br />
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Chief Design Officer, Michael Hawley</em><br />
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If you are a UX leader or the lead designer on a team, it’s likely that part of your job is helping other designers improve their skills. Fortunately, there is a wide variety of resources on the concepts and methods of experience design, information architecture, user research, and related disciplines that you can leverage in educating other designers on the fundamentals of user-centered design. However, fundamentals are just the start. In addition to understanding academic principles, good designers have mastered the soft skills relating to design. They know how to channel their creative energy, they understand how to work with others, they are effective at presenting their work, and so on. As a UX Manager or Director, coaching designers on these softer skills can be a challenge.

Coaching Experience Designers

Author: Michael Hawley

Article Published on uxmatters.com

Chief Design Officer, Michael Hawley

If you are a UX leader or the lead designer on a team, it’s likely that part of your job is helping other designers improve their ski ...

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<em>Article Published on uxmatters.com<br />
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Chief Design Officer, Michael Hawley<br />
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In your work as a UX professional, do you ever find that you need to convince people that the team should follow a user-centered design process? Do you need to convince stakeholders they should do user research? To be successful as a UX professional, you need to know how to be persuasive.

5 Ways to Be Persuasive in Your UX Work

Author: Michael Hawley

Article Published on uxmatters.com

Chief Design Officer, Michael Hawley

In your work as a UX professional, do you ever find that you need to convince people that the team should follow a user-centered design pro ...

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<em>Article published on uxmag.com<br />
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Creative Technologist, Nick Snyder<br />
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</em>Ask the question: “What companies have had the biggest influence on experience design and interaction design?” You’ll probably hear the same names over and over: Apple, Microsoft, Xerox, Braun, Disney, etc. But there’s one company that rarely gets mentioned, even though it should be near the top of everyone’s list: Nintendo.<br />
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Nintendo and its brilliant game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, have introduced several experience and product design elements that we employ every day, whether we realize it or not.<br />
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From introducing narrative structure in game design to launching hardware that revolutionized interface, Miyamoto’s influence is undeniable.

The Legend of Miyamoto: How Nintendo Shaped UX

Author: Nick Snyder

Article published on uxmag.com

Creative Technologist, Nick Snyder

Ask the question: “What companies have had the biggest influence on experience design and interaction design?” You’ll pro ...

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<em>Article Published on uxmag.com</em><br />
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Experience Director, Megan Grocki <br />
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Mention service design to your UX colleagues and you may find yourself unwittingly engaged in a game of Buzzword Bingo. Whether you call it “service design,” “holistic design,” “multi-channel experience design” or...<br />
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Service Design: Setting The Stage For The Consummate Experience

Author: Megan Grocki

Article Published on uxmag.com

Experience Director, Megan Grocki

Mention service design to your UX colleagues and you may find yourself unwittingly engaged in a game of Buzzword Bingo. Whether you call it &ldqu ...

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<em>Article published on uxmag.com<br />
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Experience Design Director, Megan Grocki<br />
Experience Designer, Jamie Thomson</em><br />
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Experience designers use a wide variety of techniques to represent the interactions between individuals, organizations, and systems. Personas are the go-to tool to aggregate a target audience’s traits, intentions, needs, and behaviors; however, they often leave out one of the most critical elements of interaction design: time. As rich as these snapshots may be, people’s needs and even their traits may change over time, and personas start to burst at the seams when it comes to illustrating a full story of engagement.

Illustrating the Big Picture: Journeys, Experiences and Interactions

Author: Jamie Thomson, Megan Grocki

Article published on uxmag.com

Experience Design Director, Megan Grocki
Experience Designer, Jamie Thomson

Experience designers use a wide variety of techniques to represent the interactions between indiv ...

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<em>Article Published on uxmag.com</em><br />
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Experience Director, Megan Grocki <br />
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We're consumers in a media-driven world. And, as such, we've grown used to product placement, telemarketing, "advertorials," and celebrity endorsements. We like football, but we love Super Bowl ads. And we know there's no shame in choking up over a credit card commercial. But treat us like just another "consumer segment," and...<br />

A Designer and a Marketer Walk Into a Bar...

Author: Megan Grocki

Article Published on uxmag.com

Experience Director, Megan Grocki

We're consumers in a media-driven world. And, as such, we've grown used to product placement, telemarketing, "advertorials," and cel ...

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The Customer Journey Map

Author: Paul Kahn

Article published on servicedesigntools.org

Experience Design Director, Paul Kahn

The customer journey map is an oriented graph that describes the journey of a user by representing the differen ...

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Considering the Customer Experience in Design

Author: Amy Cueva

Contemplating all possible touch points to optimize your audience’s interactions.

Amy Cueva, Founder, Chief Experience Officer

Every day, you keep or lose customers because of what may seem like insignificant exper ...

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<p><em>Article Published on UXMatters.com</em><br />
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Michael Hawley, SVP, Director of Experience</p>
<p>There is a trend among some in the UX community to take the U out of UX and refer to our discipline simply as experience design. One reason for this change in terminology is that it lets us talk about a specific target audience in terms that resonate with business stakeholders more than the...</p>

Design Research Methods for Experience Design

Author: Michael Hawley

Article Published on UXMatters.com

Michael Hawley, SVP, Director of Experience

There is a trend among some in the UX community to take the U out of UX and refer to our discipline simply as experience design. One rea ...

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<p><em>Taken from January 2009 issue of Intranets Magazine.</em><br />
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Amy Cueva, Founder and Chief Experience Officer<br />
Michael Hawley, SVP and User Experience Director<br />
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According to Etienne Wenger, one of the leading thinkers in the space, "Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly." ...</p>

Developing Communities of Practice

Author: Amy Cueva, Michael Hawley

Taken from January 2009 issue of Intranets Magazine.

Amy Cueva, Founder and Chief Experience Officer
Michael Hawley, SVP and User Experience Director

According to Etienne Wenger, one of the leading thi ...

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A Case Study Published on UXMatters.com</em><br />
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Author: Mike Hawley, SVP, Director of User Experience<br />
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In the design process we follow at my company, Mad*Pow Media Solutions, once we have defined the conceptual direction and content strategy for a given design and refined our design approach through user research and iterative usability testing, we start applying visual design. Generally, we take a key screen whose structure and functionality we have finalized—for example, a layout for a home page...

Rapid Desirability Testing

Author: Michael Hawley

A Case Study Published on UXMatters.com

Author: Mike Hawley, SVP, Director of User Experience

In the design process we follow at my company, Mad*Pow Media Solutions, once we have defined the conceptual d ...

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Insights

Consumer Decisions in a Social World
In a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review that focused on branding, David Edelman articulates how consumers’ engagement with brands is evolving with the proliferation of social media and other digital channels.
The Legend of Miyamoto: How Nintendo Shaped UX
Perhaps the greatest innovation Miyamoto brought to the gaming industry—and by extension, the web—was the popularization of a narrative structure. This may seem pretty silly to think about now—not unlike thinking that the mouse or GUI wasn’t a big deal—but it was pretty revolutionary for its time.
Mad*Pow Boston Harlem Shake