From the Field

Digital prototypes help teams test out new ideas quickly and cheaply, allowing them to catch potential usability issues before engineers spend valuable time building flawed features or products. It is through finding out where our assumptions fall short that we create the best products.

World Information Architecture Day, now in its sixth year, is taking place this Saturday at over 50 locations across five continents. The distributed conference subsists on the efforts of a small army of volunteer IA professionals, from local speakers and organizers to the global leadership team.

When ZS Associates went through a company-wide rebranding in 2014, Elizabeth Benker—at the time a Design Lead, and now the UX Manager for the firm's Javelin™ Product Suite—saw the opportunity for a systematic, standards-based approach to the design overhaul of the product portfolio.

There comes a time in the life of a young and successful manufacturing firm when disconnected homegrown systems and spreadsheets aren’t enough to keep up with the volume of demand. That’s when people like Ken Randall come into the picture.

In Italian, the word "fiori" means flower. Three years ago, that’s not a word that would likely spring to mind when thinking about enterprise business applications. SAP, known for creating software that form the digital spine of some of the world’s largest companies, recognized that.

In 2014, CarMax set off on a journey to bring in Lean UX design principles to its organization. The company, known for revolutionizing the used car buying process in the U.S., is now focused on redesigning its web and mobile apps to seamlessly integrate the digital and store experience for its customers.

John Henry Krahenbuhl, Lead User Experience Designer at Epsilon and author of several books on prototyping, walks us through a recent client project that used interactive prototypes to quickly gather consensus around a design challenge--how to satisfy multiple client stakeholder interests on a single page.

Digital Telepathy has always done things differently. When you hire the San Diego-based design firm, you won’t hear any pitches. Instead, you’ll embark on a journey with a partner, one that involves a constant flow of conversation to propel the project forward. This journey is called Objective-Based Design.

Change is difficult, but not changing is fatal. So goes the anthem for many a business leader looking to innovate and stay ahead of the curve. Dani Nordin, UX Director at Pegasystems and author of several O’Reilly design books, shares her recent experience in introducing change at one of the world’s most venerable corporate brands, the Harvard Business Review.