Therese's UXellence Blog

Published on UXPlanet, October 15, 2018

“Too many chefs spoil the soup” is an apt proverb for describing the tension that can arise in large-scale creative team collaboration. How do sizable design departments reconcile the individual vision and innate sense of style that creative people possess, when conflicts in personal taste and execution threaten to spoil the soup? Even with the advent of design systems, ‘the way you designed it’ isn’t always the same as ‘the way I would have designed it’ and if patience runs in short supply, opinions flare — costing time for design teams and testing relationships with heated discourse.

So what do you do if you find yourself dismantling a colleague’s design solution, because you think your approach could be better, even with collaborative design team critiques and reviews? First, take a deep breath … then follow these guidelines to the letter. (Your manager will thank you for it.) These best practices preserve trust and respect — essential ingredients for any functional group — and you’ll notice themes including respecting your fellow designers, assuming personal responsibility, and exhibiting grace, humility, maturity, and collaborative spirit.

Published on UXPlanet, July 30 2018

The User Experience Design process is complex and organic, and — like so many problems UX professionals encounter — challenging to express in simple terms.

Most visual models of the UX process push boxes and arrows to the limit in a struggle to capture the iterative and collaborative nature of the enterprise design progression. The video below, which is my latest UX process visualization, breaks free from Euclidean convention in leveraging Fractal geometry — in a storytelling capacity — to describe the UX process at scale.

In 2008, partway through my first year as a Graphic Design M.F.A. graduate student, SCAD-Atlanta engaged award-winning industrial designer Karim Rashid to give a lecture. This turned out to be a highly formative moment in my professional development. Rashid was fiercely eccentric — outfitted in pure white with tattoos and large glasses — and a magnetic speaker, dazzling us with the fluid morphic shapes and electric colors of his product design portfolio. I’d never seen someone so passionate or outspoken in the design community, with such a tall point of view and an agenda about the power of design, and I soaked up the message of his manifesto like a sponge.