Possibly the ugliest thing on the water

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iceberg climbing structureIn my quest to prove that some people have too much money, I present to you the Iceberg. Possibly the ugliest thing on the water.

Hopefully you won't have to stare at it from your dock this summer.

On sale now at Overstock.com for the low, low price of... CAD$7535.09 {chokes}.

(Overstock via Crunchgear)

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Designing the team experience: Building culture through onboarding (Slides from PPPConf, Chicago 2018)

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On Thursday, August 9, 2018, I delivered a presentation on team culture at the Prototypes, Process and Play conference in Chicago.

My presentation was a case study of an enterprise project where onboarding was not a priority and the project was a giant mess. Meanwhile, the little sub-team that I was on paid a lot of attention to designing the team member experience, including onboarding, and in turn ended up developing a reusable process for designing the team member experience.

My takeaways were:
Your team is an element of your project that needs to be designed. If you don’t build onboarding into your processes, people can get lost along the way.In UX, when you don't design the team member experience, you sacrifice the experience of your people for the experience of your users.Help new hires become part of the team and set them up to be productive contributors. Create a ramp-up process to show new hires how their work will make an impact.Establish and share your project folklore e…
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UX Theatre: Are You Just Acting Like You're Doing User-Centered Design?

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Back in January, I wrote a Twitter thread about projects that pay lip service to user-centered design (UCD) and what we can do about it as designers. Here's an expanded write-up of the topic, for those of you who requested some additional context. (The original tweets are in italics.)

A few projects I've come across recently are doing UX theatre, not actual user-centered design. Sadly, it's becoming more prevalent as execs learn the term UX but their teams aren't empowered to do all the work that UX entails.
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People pepper their pres…
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UX Theatre: The Poster

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In January 2018, I wrote a Twitter thread about how some user experience projects tend to pay lip service to user-centered design rather than being actual user-centered design. I used the term "UX Theatre" to describe the phenomenon. Based on the reaction online, it seems that this is a common occurrence across the industry. People responded with emotional reactions, sharing their own UX Theatre stories, and thanking me for putting a label on it.

I followed up in March 2018 with a more fullsome blog post, UX Theatre: Are You Just Acting Like You're Doing User-Centered Design? which added more detail and examples to the tweetstorm.

This year, I created a poster which details the issue, lists symptoms, and provides actionable recommendations that we, as UX practitioners or leaders, can use to help prevent or correct UX Theatre. I presented it at the Information Architecture Conference 2020 Poster Night, and invited people to stop by and tell me their UX Theatre stories. It…
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