How do you become an inspirational leader of a UX department? In particular, one that needs to gather existing habits, change some of them, and set a new direction. There are many good leadership books you can read and plenty of management theory, but in these strange and surreal times, we need to observe leaders in practice and learn from how they act and behave.
I recently spoke to Mads Norlyk, Head of UX at Jyske Bank in Silkeborg, Denmark about his role, recent lessons learned, and his experiences keeping the team creative and motivated.
Mads has been 3 years with the bank and was previously Digital Experience Manager at LEGO Education. Earlier he was on the agency side as User Experience Designer at Designit. Mads is our expert of the month.
Read moreUsing a wonderful example of the fictitious software firm Titanic Corp, experienced facilitator and agile coach Aino Corry made it clear in our recent member conference call, that the point of a retrospective is not to blame Peter, but rather to understand the circumstances that led to striking an iceberg and ultimately sinking.
Aino has recently written a book about antipatterns for retrospectives because she seemed to be making the same mistakes over and over. Antipatterns are like patterns, only more informative. With antipatterns you will first see what patterns re-occur in "bad" retrospectives and then you will see how to avoid, or remedy, the situation.
Read moreMore and more solutions are coming in the headless space. It is great to have more options, but you need to understand the pros and cons of each solution to find the best fit.
Ivo Lukac shares his insights and a few recommendations:
consider your overall strategy, where are you going with your project(s)
analyse what kind of architecture you need and research which products fit (unfortunately there is no better way than to try it yourself or find someone insightful you can trust)
try not to reinvent the wheel
Don’t lose your head
Read more“When you are on the customer side, you need to really own the problem and the actual solution. “
This quote stuck with me in my recent conversation with Gurdeep Singh from Danish insurance firm Tryg. He has previously worked for over a decade as a consultant in various roles at Accenture and Genpact and sees himself as an enabler between business and IT.
In late 2017, he moved to the customer side and joined Tryg, where he now is Product Manager, Artificial Intelligence & Robotics. He currently leads the Robotics Center of Excellence, where he spends much time working with his Indian-based team. Gurdeep is our expert of the month.
Read moreWith 3 chatbots in production and one more launched during the height of COVID19 in April, Danish insurance firm Tryg saw a substantial usage increase and also learned a few valuable lessons.
Aiste Hoffbeck is digital front runner at Tryg in Copenhagen and recently joined our member conference call series to share insights on their chatbots.
Read my notes from the call, including some additional perspectives from the Q&A.
Read moreIt seems content management has been dealing with the paradox of opportunity and frustration since the inception of the World Wide Web.
Douglas Adams was right - it is fun for nerds like us. To our credit, we spend a lot of time discussing these problems at length, and actually trying to build products and practices to address them - and in many ways, the underlying technologies and frameworks are vastly more effective to what passed for state of the art only a few years ago.
However, despite these advancements in technologies and methodologies which have made scaling these operations cheaper, faster, and far more capable, it’s clear from the research in the market; over time a similar percentage of organizations still have sub-par customer experience and despite falling prices for tools and services, overall costs for customer experience delivery still remain high.
In this post Mark Demeny from Contentful tries to break these problems down from a wider, strategic view, to a more tactical level.
Read moreThe stories that we tell ourselves drive behavior. The stories help us understand who we are and why we do what we do, but how can you actually get people to change their self story?
In our recent member conference call, Susan Weinschenk joined us from rural Wisconsin for a conversation on the power of self stories to drive behavior. Susan has a Ph.D. in Psychology and in 2013 she published "How To Get People To Do Stuff" where she describes the seven basic drivers of human motivation. Susan focuses on how to use human behavior research to dramatically improve the impact of your products and services.
Read moreData ethics might sound like an esoteric topic, but in our digital world, it’s increasingly something that both individuals and organisations are making a part of their key decisions. Data ethics or perhaps rather lack thereof have already had dramatic impact on the world scene with far reaching implications towards democracy and probably more aspects of our daily lives than we think.
I recently spoke to Copenhagen-based Pernille Tranberg as she talked about data, privacy, digital self defence and what you can actually do as an individual. Pernille is co-founder of the European think-do-tank Dataethics.eu and our expert of the month.
Read moreFast growing technology firm UiPath secured another $225 million investment last week. UiPath is used by several of our members in the automation & robotics peer groups. Many of which have not forgotten that it’s actually less than a year ago, that UiPath was bleeding cash and had a huge layoff wave.
While the investment clearly is exciting to some, it’s also a big gamble that increases expectations. What does it really mean for customers?
Read more4 months with a pandemic truly changed everything. A fast forward both in terms of work habits and technology adoption. We probably haven’t seen the bigger impact just yet.
Having built a community on meeting in person made our past months tricky to say the least.
Here’s our community update for the past strange and surreal months.
Read moreContent strategy has been around for a while as a term, but personally I do think that the pandemic has shown the importance of communications and specifically content.
As Hilary Marsh said in our recent member conference call:
Content is everyone’s work
Read moreA few years ago, it finally dawned on me, that our focus as a community had shifted. From the original roots in bringing together web and intranet professionals, to a much broader scope. Suddenly, it became clear, that the work we were doing, the lessons we learned, had a much bigger impact.
I was reminded of this, when I spoke to Seattle-based Emily Corace and listened to her talk about her work on user-centered design. As she said:
“To create something that is naturally understood we need to focus on the behavior of the user. By designing experiences that are understood intuitively, we can create a positive impact through our work.”
This is clearly about much more than just creating a pretty website!
Emily is an Experience Designer with The Garrigan Lyman Group and our expert of the month.
Read moreIf you want to make sure that your design system doesn’t get left behind, you need to create a community around it, so that many can participate and keep it alive.
This was one of the key messages in a recent member conference call with Torstein Aas-Hansen, who is a design leader at the Norwegian insurance firm Gjensidige.
Based on his experience as Product Owner Gjensidige.Design, Torstein shared his insights on design leadership, Design Ops and how they manage design at the insurance firm.
Read moreFrom the world of Kentico comes a product rebrand. Having been one of the long standing vendors with CMS roots to actually keep CMS in the product name, Kentico CMS is now rebranded as Kentico Xperience.
What does that mean to customers and the market?
Read moreThe effects of physical distancing have created a lot of opportunity to increase loyalty from existing customers, and capture new ones, via your website. There's also the risk of losing customers and brand value if you can't accommodate their shifting expectations.
That all means companies need to do more to support their customers via their websites. And the economic impact of everyone staying indoors means that a lot of companies are cutting budgets and staff. They need to do more, with less, in a complex environment.
Read more