“Kill Your Darlings” with lean user experience design

A cute fuzzy bunny

Kill me

Last night, I went to a great talk with a funny title by Janice Fraser. Lean UX design is an emerging concept that incorporates high-quality, high-velocity UX design into agile development processes.

“Kill Your Darlings” implores us to not fall in love with our designs — or even assume they’re good — until we’ve properly validated them. Rather, the UX design must go through rapid cycles of prove-improve as you dial-in to what actually works in the real world.

Janice’s presentation is on Slideshare, for the curious. Unfortunately, you won’t get all her great commentary, which is why you should see her speak if you can. Even better, sign up for one of her workshops.

A more team-focused article + presentation is by Tim McCoy at Cooper.com.

 

Wordle: Prettier tag clouds

I’ve been interested in information design for a long time, have read most of Edward Tufte’s books and recently started playing with data visualization. The idea of taking a heap of data that is otherwise meaningless in its raw form, making sense of it in some visually meaningful way, and especially making it beautiful, is really cool.
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