AI-generated personas sound like a dream: faster insights, lower costs, happier stakeholders. But there’s a catch—if you build for fake users, you risk losing the real ones. The choice isn’t just about speed. It’s about trust, accuracy, and your reputation as a thoughtful, strategic designer. A tra
Ever found your workday disappearing into tasks that don't require your expertise? Scheduling meetings, reformatting decks, and tracking action items can keep you from the strategic design work you were hired to do. AI won't fix bad processes, but it can reclaim hours lost to repetitive work. Hours
An integral part of the Design Thinking process is the definition of a meaningful and actionable problem statement, which the design thinker will focus on solving. This is perhaps the most challenging part of the Design Thinking process, as the definition of a problem (also called a design challenge
Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. Creating personas
You don’t want to spend your whole life redesigning the wheel, do you? No, neither do we. If you are looking for a design that solves a problem that has been solved with a different application before, then the template for your wheel is probably already out there. This lets you save time and make a
In your work as a designer, you will find yourself working closely with different stakeholders, and none more common than software engineers or developers, who are responsible for implementing your designs. Designers and developers share a common goal — to do what’s best for the user and for the bus
“What UX tools should I learn so that I can build my portfolio?” “How do I learn UX tools?” We get these questions a lot here at the Interaction Design Foundation. If you’re starting out in UX, you might have these burning questions, too. So, here, we’ll go through everything you need to know about
You are an expert! If you want to move up in a company or convince people to support your ideas, you need to communicate your expertise and excitement clearly. Sounds easy, right? The problem is that the more expertise you have, the harder it can be to communicate. In this video, Don Norman shares h
You might see the "UX/UI designer" job title and think UX and UI are interchangeable. There’s overlap, for sure, but in spite of all the things that do carry over between the UX and UI spheres, the two are definitely separate disciplines.[[video:1500]]This video breaks down the differences between U
Once an ideation session like brainstorming, brainwriting or cheatstorming has finished, it’s time to collect, categorize, refine and narrow down the best idea, solution or strategy. Here are the best selection methods. They’re Sticky note voting, the Four Categories method, the Bingo Selection meth
Most designers probably agree that accessibility matters: We want to create designs and interfaces that don’t exclude users with disabilities. There are plenty of obvious moral reasons that accessibility matters, but, unfortunately, accessibility considerations are often one of the first things to g
The role of designers is changing. We continue to design products and services, but we also design more in the way of complex socio-technical systems and systemic challenges such as climate change, poverty and inequality. In this video, Don Norman makes the case that the way designers learn must als
In 1952, Paul MacLean introduced the term 'limbic system', which refers to the interconnected brain structures responsible for much of our emotional experience. MacLean's recognition of the limbic system as an important and functional set of connected structures perhaps represents his most prominent
Color is powerful. It has the power to persuade, evoke, express and communicate. It can also be an effective tool to communicate with your users. However, color is subjective and must be used in the right context. The context of our relationship with color is a complex one, rooted in biological, cul
You’re a designer. You’ve got talent, vision, and a lot of potential—and know that, somewhere ahead, you’ve got an open road on a great employment “highway” to fulfill that potential. But what about putting that portfolio together? You know you need it, but it can feel like an endless traffic jam of
Has Don Norman convinced you to work on important societal issues? As a lone designer, what can you do? If you are a new designer who has just graduated from design school, an experienced designer, or a designer who would like to shift your company’s path toward helping the world, there are ways to
What is the future of design? Which skills will you need in the 21st century? In this video, Don Norman gives four examples of the tasks that designers might be doing in the 21st century, and the four types of designers that will be needed.“So there you are. Four different kinds of design problems,
Written content is a crucial part of UX design. Without engaging copy, your UX will suffer. UX writing is a reasonably new specialization in UX design, but the content has always existed. As the industry has begun to recognize the significance of UX writing and words as a design tool, many new excit
Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? What’s special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract,
A user-centered design process maps the current state of the world and envisions preferred future states in the form of new computational artifacts. Service design relies on a similar process with some important differences. Most importantly, a service design process results in a system, a service c
AI is replacing jobs everywhere, yet design jobs are booming with a projected 45% job growth. With design skills, you can create products and services people love. More love means more impact and greater salary potential.
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