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Industry insights, podcast episodes, and more—all focused on putting humans first.
Strategy
Your AI Strategy Needs More Than a Chatbot: Three Levers to Guide Your AI Strategy
Define how your AI should behave before choosing interfaces. Learn the three levers—user intent, agency, and presence—that shape a trustworthy AI strategy.
The Green Grass Dilemma: When MVPs Fall Short
When MVPs fall short, users feel stuck—not empowered. Learn how to build Minimum Viable Products that actually lead to better outcomes and lasting value.
The Tradeoff Every Product Team Faces: Global vs Local Optimization
Product leaders face a constant tradeoff; scale with global consistency or move fast with local wins. Here’s how to reduce user mental load.
The Fingerprint of a Project: Why Great UX Looks Different on Every Project
Every project has a unique fingerprint. Learn how recognizing constraints and pushing strategically can lead to healthier teams and better UX outcomes.
How Much Does UX Cost? A Real-World Guide to Strategic UX Investment
Wondering how much UX design really costs? Learn what drives the price—from quick wins to full strategy—and how to invest wisely in human-centered design.
From Surface to Strategy: Why UX Belongs at the Leadership Table
Discover why UX design is more than just visuals. Learn about Jesse James Garrett's Elements of User Experience, from surface to strategy, and how integrating design thinking at a leadership level can transform your products and business outcomes. This comprehensive guide helps you understand the true power of human-centered design.Humans First podcast.
Domain Deep Dive & Designing for Defense & UX Challenges in Military Tech
Military and defense software lags behind in UX maturity due to security restrictions, bureaucracy, and outdated tools. Discover the biggest UX challenges, why usability is becoming a strategic advantage, and what commercial teams can learn from defense design. Read more.
Your Roadmap Is Lying to You—Why Features Won’t Fix Your Product
Stuck in the feature trap? Discover how shifting from a customer-led to a design-led approach can lead to true innovation. Learn the three phases of product maturity and how to redefine your product experience to lead, not follow. Listen now!
The Three Models That Shape Every Product (And How to Use Them)
Unlock the secret to better product design by aligning the three key models: engineering, user, and design. Learn how misalignment can lead to failure and how intentional design creates seamless, user-friendly experiences. Listen to the Humans First episode now!
How Long Does UX Design Take? Demystifying the UX Timeline
How long does UX take? Many companies underestimate the timeline, leading to rushed products and bad user experiences. This article breaks down the UX process, risks of short timelines, and how to set realistic expectations.
Design Maturity - Improving Your Organization's Design Influence
Learn about the 7 levels of design maturity and how organizations can assess and grow their design practices. Discover key strategies for improving UX, fostering innovation, and creating better user experiences. Listen now on *Humans First*.
Introducing Humans First - Getting to Simple is Hard
UX isn’t just about design—it’s about understanding people. In this episode of Humans First, we explore the hidden complexities of UX, from military and healthcare redesigns to why business leaders struggle to define its value. Listen now!
The UX Timeline - How Design Impacts Your Delivery Date
Does UX design add time to your project timeline? Yes and no. Find out why adding three months to the front end of your project saves big time in the end.
Human-Centered Design is not Always Synonymous With ‘Tech’
I recently used a McDonald’s kiosk for the first time to place my order. While the rest of the world moves toward more human-like experiences, McDonald’s is introducing tech into their restaurants that seems to take a step backwards. Is adding new technology always the best solution when it comes to human-centered design?
How human-centered designers prevent Frankenstein’s creature
Enterprise software stitched together with an agglomeration of design elementsundermines usability and brand perception. How human-centered designers canprevent this.
How to Nurture and Sell a Great Idea
Getting a great idea into the production cycle is hard. The key is to slow down, understand what you’re trying to accomplish, tailor your communication to your audience, and create a story [together] that your team and executives can rally around.
Four Ways Your Great Idea Causes Organizational Chaos
Every idea comes with the best intentions. So why do so many good ideas have such disastrous outcomes? Learn four ways you're causing organizational chaos with your great ideas.
The Best Customer Experiences Have These 3 Qualities
Most companies have a misperception about the experience they are actually delivering to their customers.
Mental Models: Mind the Gaps
It goes without saying that most businesses realize success through customer growth and loyalty. Designing our products and services to match the models users have in their head—or making our product so clear they can easily generate an accurate model of how it works—directly impacts both growth and long-term loyalty.
Keep the ribs out of the bread basket: The importance of setting a clear team vision.
Have you ever had a vision that seemed so abundantly clear that it didn’t even cross your mind that someone else wouldn’t see it the same way? So why don't they? What happens in translation?
Conversational Content is King
Customers are the driving force behind business strategy. It’s no longer enough to have a product that functions — there is now an expectation that a product should delight. The only way to know how someone feels when using your app, walking through your store, or calling your support team, is to let them tell you. We are in the age of the customer, and it’s high time we embrace it.
UX in Agriculture: What are we trying to do?
In farming, the precision agriculture ecosystem relies heavily on agronomic advisers, and software companies aren’t capitalizing on the existing gaps. Instead, it seems as though the focus has remained on digitizing the paper filled binders and modernizing (improving the short-term user experience), but not modifying, the processes of yesterday.
A Lesson from Chick-fil-A: Don't Serve Chicken, Serve People
Chick-fil-A has established themselves as an organization who focuses on culture and values. They disrupt the old way of thinking about fast food as they take their customer's experience to the next level. Each of their highlighted service points can be translated to familiar steps in the UX/CUX process.
Reducing Choice Overload by Anticipating Your Users Goals
We encounter thousands of choices each day, some large and some small. We love having options—they’re empowering and give a sense of control. But sometimes too many choices can become overwhelming. Anticipatory design in UX can help reduce the number of choices users are faced with each day.
UX Design Can Help You Break the Curse of Knowledge
The curse of knowledge can choke out empathy toward users, allow jargon to creep its way into your product, and create a tendency to build out complicated (and expensive) features that few will use.
Responsible Innovation: Safety in Product Design
As UX designers, it’s part of our job to make sure that the experiences we create are safe for people to use. It's important to design for the habits and goals of customers, as long as it doesn't come at the cost of user safety.
UX on the Move: How Can I Optimize UX across platforms?
From the moment you wake up to the minute you plug in your phone for the night, you’re surrounded by technology. It’s in your pocket, on your desktop, in your car, and maybe even on your wrist. It’s...
Is UX a form of marketing?
Our short answer? Yes. And here are our thoughts behind it. If you’re in marketing, you may not pay a lot of attention to user experience design. It might seem like something that should be confined...
Is It Too Late to Bring in UX?
Is your customer service call center flooded with calls? Is your product getting bad reviews online? Does it have a low retention rate? You’re not alone. It’s not uncommon for a company to find...
The ROI of UX - Is it Worth the Investment?
Why establish a UX budget? Because a good user experience is the expectation, research and testing exposes opportunities and corrects misconceptions, and the ROI is significant.
When I was a young information designer...
When I was a young information designer card sorting was all the rage. I first heard about it from the work being done at Sun Microsystems by Jakob Nielson and Darrel Sano. Even then it struck me as...
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