When you decide to have a conversation with your users, you should follow structured steps to prepare it since well-structured…
User Experience
Stained glass skylight at the McGill University Faculty Club.
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UX Guide for Design
In this post, I will focus on the design process. This is the first in a series regarding the entire…
How to Uncover Valuable Insights From User Research
Analysis and synthesis of your user research data is critical if you want people to act upon your study and…
The Conversation Is the Method: The Importance of User Research
Conversations Over Methods I’m passionate about Design Thinking, yet I don’t have a preference for which method is best. This…
How to Craft Valuable User Research Questions
Conducting user research is the most rewarding form of uncovering and capturing actionable insights for your product and service, but…
5 signs you have outgrown Google and Excel for User Research
For years, I cobbled together various tools in order to help me plan, capture, analyze and share user research. I…
How to Make Sure Your Research Planning is Successful
At Handrail, our mission is to inspire great design through human understanding. Understanding people, their needs, and goals, in context, is critical to design success.
The Design Challenge: How to Plan Successful Projects
While design projects can seem overwhelming and chaotic, by taking the time to frame and articulate the challenge, you can…
Top 3 Continuous Discovery Questions
Our most cherished products and services have the best user experiences. Think about it for a second. What are the…
Phase Three: Design
The Design Phase is the fourth installment in a series of posts regarding how organizations can leverage design to create…
The startup problems you weren’t told about
The startup problems you weren’t told about… We’ve all heard startups are hard, but you don’t really comprehend how mind-numbingly…
Did you seriously just say: ‘We don’t have time to talk to our users.’?
Did you seriously just say: ‘We don’t have time to talk to our users’? Because we sure have plenty of time…
How to Create Products People Absolutely Love with Continuous Discovery
User research should be a continuous activity. “Software development is an activity of discovery. We must take action to reveal…
Why You Should Talk with Your Users
Anytime we create a product or service, we want to know whether people actually use them or not. We also…
“Ahhhh! You’re doing it wrong!”
“Ahhhh! You’re doing it wrong!” — Said every designer watching their first usability test I know exactly how you’re feeling right…
Agile 2.0 & The Evolution of its Methods
The way we understand Agile needs to evolve. Remember that our higher order objective is to validate our ideas the…
Do’s and Don’ts for User Interviews (info-graphic)
Info-graphic on the do’s and don’ts when conducting user interviews About Handrail We built Handrail to help teams…
How we ran a Google Design Sprint on a video game
This is a story about a GV style design sprint. If you’ve never heard of that, you can learn more…
UX Spotlight With Becki Hyde
We caught up with Becki Hyde, the Digital Product Manager within the Digital Experience Center at Humana to find out…
We need to put the consumer back at the focus of the Consumer Electronics Show.
We need to put the consumer back at the focus of the Consumer Electronics Show. That was my big take…
Top 3 Impacts on UCD & UX in 2018
Disclaimer: I am a Product Manager and User Researcher, not an attorney. This article was written for UCD and UX…
UX Spotlight with Katy Cobian
Breaking Down Silos to Improve the Customer Journey We sat down with CX Strategy Manager, Katy Cobian to learn more…
Simplifying the User Research Process
We’ve Made The Research Process Even Easier! You spoke up and we listened. We all know that surveys can be an integral part…
Prototyping: Build to Think, Build to Decide
Background Recently, at a Meetup of our local chapter of the IxDA (International Design Association), fifteen professionals discussed how we approach prototyping…