Rachel Krause

Pause, Clarify, and Strategize! In UX and project management, time pressure often dictates our pace, sometimes at the cost of deeper discovery. Yet, I’ve found that taking even a single extra day to review challenges with stakeholders can yield game-changing insights. This deliberate pause can illuminate nuances in stakeholder expectations and uncover potential roadblocks before they impact the project. While we’re often encouraged to ‘move fast and break things,’ I’ve seen how the mindful application of ‘pause, clarify, and strategize’ can create room for more effective, sustainable solutions. Taking this approach has led to a smoother process with fewer mid-project surprises and stronger buy-in from stakeholders, who appreciate the opportunity to voice their perspectives early.” #UXDesign #ProjectManagement

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Thanks Matej Latin, for this article. It's a valuable insight into today's highly competitive job market. You've done a great job summarizing common mistakes and issues to avoid and provided helpful tips for improving portfolios. #UXjobs, #portfolio #userexperience #jobhunt #portfoliomistakes #productdesign #uxdesign #presentation #interview #jobapplications

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As a designer with over 20 years of experience, three resources have profoundly impacted my career: Dan Mall's talk "Should Designers?..," Josh Clark's article "Only One Deliverable Matters," and Joshua Seiden's book "Outcomes Over Output." For years, I took immense pride in the pixel-perfect design comps I meticulously crafted. But these resources challenged me to rethink what truly matters in our field. Dan Mall posed a critical question: "Should designers?" This simple yet powerful inquiry pushed me to consider when and where my skills are most valuable, ensuring that my contributions are always intentional and aligned with the bigger picture. Dan reminded me that while developers can create a website without a designer, a designer can’t create a website without a developer. This insight helped me refocus on what truly drives value in our work. In 2018, Joshua Clark taught me that it's not about the plethora of design deliverables we produce—it's about the single, most impactful thing: the working software. My CEO doesn’t care about the dozens of Figma frames and Miro boards I create; he cares about the business outcomes our team’s software delivers. Clark emphasizes that while we often focus on creating numerous artifacts like wireframes, prototypes, and design comps, these are merely means to an end. The ultimate goal is to create a functional, user-friendly product that delivers real value to users. This lesson was a turning point, prompting me to prioritize the end product over the process. In 2021, Josh Seiden’s book continued to shift my focus from the tangible outputs of my work to the outcomes they generate. It's not just about what we create; it's about the difference our work makes in the lives of users. Over time, I've come to realize that creating design comps is only a small part of our role. Understanding the problem, validating our designs to ensure they meet the proposed outcomes, and building relationships and trust with our stakeholders are just as important—if not more—than the comps themselves. These lessons have transformed the way I perceive my craft. I'm no longer just a designer creating beautiful interfaces; I'm a strategist focused on meaningful outcomes and collaboration. My skills include user research, workshop facilitation, prototyping, usability testing, and visual design—whatever it takes to make our product owner and tech team successful in delivering positive outcomes. The partnership with the product owner and developers fosters trust and collaboration, ultimately earning a valued position within the team—not by demanding it, but through consistent contributions. If you're a fellow designer, I encourage you to think beyond the pixels and dive deeper into the impact your work can have. #ProductDesign #UX #OutcomesOverOutput #Agile #Collaboration #CareerGrowth

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Simple portfolio presentation tip for design leaders today: Include something about why this job. Why do you want it? What do you like about it? Don’t overcomplicate. I added one slide at the end when I applied for the Maps role. Idea is it helps you confirm what you think this role is going to be about. AND, it tells the interviewers you understand the challenges and the landscape.

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+1 to all of this, especially being an education major -> graphic designer -> logo/brand designer -> visual designer -> UX designer -> design systems practitioner Spoiler alert: the teaching degree has been the most helpful "role" to date, and every role after that was basically the same (simply with different problems to solve and artifacts to make)

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For the last little while I've been journaling some personal insights about being a mentor, the learning process, critical thinking, etc. I decided to take those thoughts and expand on them further in the form of a series of articles, which I will post on medium for the time being. ✍ In my first-ever article, I share insights from my experience mentoring aspiring designers. This article came from the question "How do you give feedback and help a design grow if they seem to be creating amazing work?". 🤔 As mentors, managers, etc., our role is more than just praise. It's about asking the right questions, focusing on the mission (not mistakes), and understanding the "why" behind each choice. 📍 Learn how to give feedback that not only celebrates successes but also plants seeds for future growth.🌱 Let's create a culture of constructive feedback that empowers everyone to reach their full potential! Would love to hear your feedback on this article and the illustrations as well! #design #mentorship #feedback #growthmindset #criticalthinking https://lnkd.in/gJxaDthQ

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I don’t think Figma is properly understanding user needs - especially when it comes to working with components; below is a clear example on how Creatie makes slots usable in the real world. But there are other huge pains that make components unrealistic to use in real life in many situations. I get the feeling that in many ways Figma components and variables are more a show-off parlor trick 🤹 that excites designers when watching Youtube videos with someone shuffling three squares on a frame, but when you try to do that with a frame with 20 components and a table with variable rows, in a setting where you don’t actually need to make a reusable component from everything, you quickly realise some of these current Figma features are not so pragmatically built. …and I am also excited that real competition is comming 😊💪, because Figma also started recently to tweak their fees up with all sorts of tricks to get advantage of their dominant position in the market.

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Disclaimer: the job market is weird, sure, and "design" as a discipline has a massive titling/career-progression-labeling problem. That said... I continue to see SENIOR #designsystem Designer roles including "Drive the vision and project management..." as the first (or close to the top) requirement in the list. That is a LEAD or a MANAGER responsibility. NOT an individual contributor! Stop adding eons worth of work and responsibility to a SENIOR IC role and then get confused, upset, or act perplexed when the entire systems program/initiative isn't "on pace" or "delivering on it's promises". This particular one that erks me also includes "manage the system's backlog and roadmap" as if that's an IC designer's job... These aren't small companies, either. These are systems that would serve 100+ consumers across disciplines. So frustrating to see. /endrant

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I love the advice here to reach out to five users a week and ask if you can talk for fifteen minutes about your product/service. Likewise, looking for recurring themes is important.  https://lnkd.in/ePM97V32

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I wish we could chat, John Cutler. Because there must be some fundamental difference in what you have witnessed and how I have worked on SaaS apps for 30 years. I have issues with the entire premise of Felix's and the team's way of working at the outset. I am assuming a long-running, Saas web app, with plenty of (boring) features across a rich problem domain (say insurance, manufacturing, banking). My approach is to do >> just enough design up front << with Felix to create a common UX pattern for the bulk of the app. I want the app to feel consistent when they are doing similar things (creating, editing, deleting, viewing lists of domain objects). Yes, some UIs need more deep UX research than others, but they are a minority in the apps I have worked to create. Then all of the developers follow along with this beautiful UX design and UI templates of sorts, making it super easy to make progress with more developers, by design -- not accident. I only need Felix when we hit new areas that need novel designs. Or if we discover some tweak is needed to the existing UI pattern. And that tweak is easily accomplished because we made it super easy to change via configuration, not hard coding. If I needed Felix on every run-of-the-mill feature, I would be doing it wrong. Call me old-fashioned, but that is how I have successfully built dozens of multi-tenant SaaS apps since the mid-90s (my most recent one has mostly 9 and 10 NPS scores).

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“Be who and where you are.” I’m still processing all of the amazing insights that came out of Clarity: A design systems community conference last week but several themes have been bouncing around in my head since then. → Get smaller and connect - Dan Mall and others talked about a trend towards smaller core design systems with surrounding layers of shared patterns like recipes, all being consumed by teams managing their own local libraries. This results in teams being able to move faster and eliminates the need for design systems folks to feel that have to be a bottleneck. → Be who and where you are - John Voss and others talked about building the system that your users and team need rather than conforming to what larger companies are putting out there or the oversimplified “stereotype” you yourself have unintentionally created for your product. → Listen - Ben Callahan and others talked about the need to reset our current mental models for how design systems teams see our roles and responsibilities. How do we move away from our perceived tactical responsibilities towards more listening and validating of the needs of our consumers and users? 💎 My personal takeaways from all of this have me reframing my own journey with my team from "a series of mistakes" towards "the necessary growth to become the team we are today." → When we implemented that now outdated framework, tried to centralize everything into a single bloated design system, or wrote all of that verbose documentation, we were doing what we needed to do to mature and are a better team as a result. → What my team is going through, we're all going through. The role of design in general is changing across the industry, not just in my organization. How lucky are we, that we have the opportunity to learn from each other as designers? → As team roles change, I’m curious to pivot my default stance away from “defend the designer's role”, and would be curious to see how I can facilitate “design” activities regardless of whether they are done by a designer, product manager, or engineer. I feel so very fortunate to be a part of such an amazing community and love the reminder that when you get a bunch of systems thinkers together in the same room, you're going to see patterns. Thanks again 🖤 Jina A. and all the speakers last week. #clarity2024 #designsystems #design

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The more that designers can think with a business mindset, the more effective they can be at influencing key stakeholders and driving desired outcomes.

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If you want to be really, really good at UX... Focus on what really matters and avoid making dumb mistakes. What matters: -Stakeholder buy in and commitment -Good user research -Iterative design + testing with users -Detailed specifications and robust component libraries -Extensive QA testing to flush out the bugs before shipping Dumb mistakes: -Berating design suggestions from non-UX team members -Behaving like design prima donnas, thinking that designers can do no wrong -Whining about not having a seat at the table when you have neither earned it nor demonstrated the capacity to sit there -Criticizing engineers and PMs for behaving like engineers and PMs Note: both lists are incomplete, but hopefully they give the gist #ux  #userexperience  #userresearch #design

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Time to deliver an output is so often mistaken with time to achieve business value.

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I am so excited about this book. If you’ve ever found that working in design is difficult, political, or otherwise painful, you should read it…and check out Scott’s talk!

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Design without reason is like building without a foundation. In my latest newsletter explain what design rationale is.

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I'm genuinely curious how many of you would work freelance/contract if you didn't have to worry about losing your health insurance (or specifically, your good PPO insurance that isn't available to individuals, just companies)? I keep bouncing around the idea of a designers/engineers co-op/union style org that has enough members to get a good insurance plan for everyone, and you just pay into it what your insurance premium would end up. If you've had individual insurance via the marketplace, or paid for COBRA coverage, you probably get what I'm on about. Maybe I'm missing something big, but how often do we limit ourselves to a job we dislike (or can't seem to land, these days) because of the non-salary benefits? As someone with disabilities, I can tell you it is a non-zero occurrence. Or, you know, we could have universal healthcare like the rest of the developed world. Or trade unions in tech. But I digress. Here's a capybara.

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Is it just me World Usability Congress or should your website adhere to at least WCAG 1.0 standards? Text as an image over video, days with no month or dates, white text on teal, no ability to tab through content, hover drop-down menus... woud be great to see this brought up to a level its intended to represent. https://lnkd.in/gwU5mGim #usabilitystandards #accessibility #customerexperience #designstandards #ux #cx #uxaudit

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One more UX Research case study is getting ready 😎 One of my batches is completing their case study and wireframes in a day or two. Post this, they will get into Design phase. UXED Practicing Mentorship Program: Deep-dive model of CORE UX that teaches you evidence-based UX Execution that are logically connected and scientifically synthesized by rationalizing and reasoning out with absolutely ZERO speculations, assumptions, biases and loopholes.

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