Shawn Lipstein

Great writeup on the value design can bring to product organisations irrespective of technoöogical shifts such as AI.

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4 ways AI can help designers? • Generate ideas to inspire creativity • Create illustrations for personas and journey maps • Plan out workshop agendas • Create alt text and image captions for better accessibility It's all about the prompts and refining them to work best for your project!

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Only one-third of CEOs could detail what their CDO oversaw at the company. In other words, 66% of CEOs couldn’t say what their CDO actually did, or how that success should be measured. No wonder only 10% of CEOs reported that a senior designer played a meaningful role in the company’s strategy. And only 17% of design leaders thought they were in the right position to give a company their full value. McKinsey concludes that 90% of companies aren’t using design talent to their full potential. https://lnkd.in/ePHAS4S3

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I'm thrilled to share that my latest product and design discovery article is live on Mind the Product! As a consultant, I've observed that the term 'Discovery' can have varying interpretations across different teams. It's not uncommon to encounter a team deeply immersed in a solution yet lacking a shared understanding of the customer opportunity they're addressing. At Lab Zero, we meet clients where they are and advocate for discovery while maintaining flexibility. We often employ lightweight methodologies to foster a shared understanding, even when work is already underway. Teresa Torres' book “Continuous Discovery Habits” is a guide to developing the mindset and practices that enable teams to discover and deliver value to their customers throughout the product development process. Her explanation of the 'Opportunity Solution Tree' helped me articulate a process for asking questions and bridging gaps when joining a new team. The first part of this two-part series looks at reversing the 'Opportunity Solution Tree' to establish a connection between the ongoing solution, customer opportunities, and business outcomes. The second part (coming soon!) will explore strategies for identifying gaps in your team's understanding of customer needs and the necessary measures to mitigate risks before launch. This series will help consultants, new team members, or a struggling team connect with that all-important why and launch valuable experiences for their customers and their orgs. Have you tried something like this with your team? Feedback is appreciated! If you haven't explored Mind The Product's extensive content library, I highly recommend it! In addition to articles about discovery and understanding customer needs, the community has shared insightful perspectives on product leadership, business, and teams. It's a great place to see perspectives on processes and theories informed by real-world use.  #ProductDiscovery #Design #Discovery #ContinuousDiscovery #Onboarding #Risk #CustomerOpportunity #Value #BusinessOutcomes

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Really looking forward to Product Design Week this year. I'm doing a talk - Why Talent & Culture Are Still Your Greatest Asset - on Day 1 of Design Leaders + (12:30-1:00 on November 11th). https://lnkd.in/gH_YVJR8 Anyone working in customer experience, design, product or strategy right now will know that we are living in - ahem - interesting times. The challenges facing leaders within brands, agencies and consultancies are more complex and fast-evolving than ever before. The experience design road has never been a smooth one, but it feels particularly rocky, potholed and full of hidden hairpins at the moment! Watching the conversations play out on LinkedIn you might safely assume that many are currently feeling pretty doom and gloom. But look at any disruptive cycle of technology-led adjustment in history and you will always see growth and positive progress right in there with the painful stuff. Personally I think that real opportunity can be found in the intersection between innovative, enabling technologies and the design of human-centred experiences - and after 30 years in the digital experience business I'm still convinced that's right where it's always lived. Teams who can combine the ability to deliver compelling customer experiences with the competencies to harness data, AI and genuine insight are going to be the real unlockers of value. And organisations that are able to access and attract those people - and provide the right environment and culture to empower and retain them - will achieve true competitive advantage and return on investment. My talk on the 11th is going to focus on those factors. Ultimately, technology comes and goes. It arrives all shiny and shouty, then it gets all habitual and legacy on you. What doesn't change is the importance of the skilled talent that can build magic from base metals - and making sure that that talent is supported by an environment in which it can create and deliver that magic. Hope to see you there! #PDW24 #Talent #Culture #Experience #Design #Leadership #Technology

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✨ It's not about the artifact, it's about the insight. ✨ Heidi Trost shares her experience with personas that made an impact. 📝 Instead of complex deliverables, she focused on capturing core insights in a few simple phrases in an infographic. These insights tied behaviors to business goals – and that’s what resonated. 📊 It wasn’t about how it looked, but how well it communicated across the team. 🌟 #UXResearch #BusinessGoals #EffectiveCommunication

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So immensely proud of such an amazing group of people who've been working so hard on this big set of launches at Figma for #Config2024. ICYMI what we launched today, this blog post recap covers it well: https://lnkd.in/gX3KSWj3 I wanted to share a couple fun tweets from a few of the fantastic designers/leaders that worked on some of the things you may have seen in our keynote this morning. * This is not even close to an exhaustive list of those who worked on today's launches, but just a quick lil glimpse showcasing a few who happened to post about them today (also linkedin obscures the links for some reason, but they're all just fun behind the scenes tweets not shady sites I promise lol): Figma Slides - Keeyen Y.: https://lnkd.in/gmxBH3wq - Mihika Kapoor: https://lnkd.in/gr54Upnu - Natasha T. / Ryan Reid: https://lnkd.in/gd-v9gE3 Redesigned Figma (UI3) - Ryhan Hassan: https://lnkd.in/g868XAze (can't wait to watch the behind the scenes talk with him and Joel Miller and KC Oh as well as Wayne Sun's when they come online later) - Tim Van Damme: https://lnkd.in/gQyvqzYr - Nikolas Klein: https://lnkd.in/ge_kKyvD Figma AI - Jordan Singer: https://lnkd.in/gXmFeXTM - Oscar Dumlao: https://lnkd.in/gkACVY_c - Marco Cornacchia: https://lnkd.in/gMt3BvVY - Vincent van der Meulen: https://lnkd.in/gCrHvcVu - Jediah Katz: https://lnkd.in/gMxEu7i8 - Giorgio Caviglia: https://lnkd.in/gCNVQrKC And more: - Jenny Wen (pages design by rocky chen ✌️): https://lnkd.in/gd_6RHAv - Soundharya Muthukrishnan: https://lnkd.in/gsnibt-j - Daniel Destefanis: https://lnkd.in/gu6mYBe6 - Becca Ramos: https://lnkd.in/gqM7RGKQ We hope you enjoy these updates, and excited to meet more of the amazing community at Config for Day 2 tomorrow! I'm particularly excited for Marcin Wichary's talk tomorrow at 3:40 https://lnkd.in/gvJNNerg

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Product designers take note. The world is changing so quickly. If you're not designing these kinds of experiences, you are creating something that is already obsolete: 👉🏼 AI agents that work for you proactively 24/7, and autonomously complete tasks and workflows on your behalf. 👉🏼 Multi-modal discussions that include voice, text, and visuals all at once. 👉🏼 Tools that combine all your data into a single knowledgebase that empowers AI with extreme understanding and real-time context across multiple channels and touchpoints. ❌ Wrappers around ChatGPT don't count. You'll be cannibalized. ❌ Co-pilots added on to legacy products don't count. That's still old-paradigm, human-first thinking. It needs to be an end-to-end experience (not a point solution!) that solves valuable niche use cases and replaces labour. (The labour budget is way bigger than the software budget!) That's the future of all software. If you're not building the future, find another job that will allow you to. Anyone disagree? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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🤹‍♂️ “I had no idea you could do that” As we attempt to scale and white-label our design systems, we've run into providing some options that leave our team a bit stumped and scratching our heads. After doing some research, I’m appreciating all the efficiency gains you can pull off with just a few Figma tricks and tutorials. → Small components are easy, but as components get more complex or resemble layouts, tracking all the possible nested variations is impossible. → Sometimes components have optional elements that show and hide depending on the needs of a specific client or context. → “You get a logo, you get a logo, everyone gets a logo“ Everyone has their own branding, which means toggling between multiple logos and lockups. With some digging, we found resources to help with all of these use cases: 🖼 Building flexible components with "slots" by Luis Ouriach is a super useful walkthrough for experimenting with the concept of slots in Figma. “Slots” allow you to create a placeholder component inside a more complex “container” component allowing you to build more flexible and context-specific layouts. https://lnkd.in/gp2JEFFU 🙈 An Introduction to Boolean Variables in Figma by UI Collective offers a simple overview of how to apply use the hidden gem of variables options. Boolean variables allow you to show and hide elements not just in prototypes but in component variants. This was useful when we wanted to toggle elements within components for various themes. https://lnkd.in/gWt8QRit 🎭 Modes: Changing a Branded Header by Nate Greenwall was exactly the solution I was looking for when I needed to offer multiple logo options from a centralized library. The playground file maps out how you can pull this off with string variables and modes. https://lnkd.in/gJhcemcm 💎 I hope some of the resources that we've leveraged at Exygy can be helpful for you and your teams working in Figma. → Leverage slots for nesting smaller components within larger container layouts. → Utilize boolean variables to show and hide elements across variants. → Experiment with using string variables to switch elements like logos for different brands. #figma #ui #design #DesignSystems #variables

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Love this thoughtful and balanced argument for resetting expectations for what design (lowercase d intentional) and design leaders can and can't fix from Sarah Gallivan Mitchell. Andy Polaine, in his response (https://lnkd.in/eC959VEc) to the some of the same rhetoric Sarah responds to, has likened the growth of the design industry in the past 15-20 years to the Cambrian Explosion. It bears considering that the real Cambrian Explosion was followed in relatively short order by multiple mass extinction events. Some species that were less well adapted to the changing conditions for life on Earth didn't make it, but this allowed new forms of life to develop and flourish. My hope is that some evolutionary selection may take place over time in regards to which voices are anointed to speak for All of Design, so that voices like Sarah's may, too, be heard and flourish. #design #designleadership #futureofdesign https://lnkd.in/eQ-PGgBM

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"The strategic design gold rush is over." While this might sound like a scary sentiment at first, I'm choosing to see it as an opportunity for design leadership. It's a chance for reinvention of what role design led teams can play in corporate settings. Users are increasing their demand for simple and straightforward user experiences. Every company continues to need more user and customer advocacy and design leaders are perfectly positioned to be the fabric of that advocacy and stitch together the functions required to deliver it to market. Rather than being relegated to a subordinate capability in product-led companies, design leaders can now redefine their purpose, leveraging their skills in user empathy, strategic experiential planning and continue to tie together the often disparate agendas at play in organizations. #Design #Leadership #Reinvention #Innovation

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It is finally out 🎉 ! I had the pleasure of working on the design of NN/g's very first published book, "Digital Icons that Work", authored by NN/g's Insights Architect, Kate Kaplan, and Director of Product, Kelley Gordon. The book acts as your ultimate guide to creating transformative iconography for digital interfaces. It covers everything you need to know about digital iconography and is truly a delight to read. Inside, you'll find: ✨ Expert strategies for crafting intuitive icons that elevate UX and usability 🔍 In-depth research on how users understand and interpret icons 🎨 Practical guidelines to enhance icon meaning and visual appeal. Make sure to grab a copy! 🔗 Available now on Amazon: https://a.co/d/dOZFFpm #NewRelease #UXDesign #IconDesign #DigitalIcons #UserExperience #ProductDesign #DesignPsychology #NNg #UXBooks

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So, the dscout Research team has questions. 🤓 If conducting research is in any way a part of your job, Nathan would like to conduct research on you! Consider taking this brief survey of his -- you could get yourself a coveted pair of People Nerds socks, just sayin. #peoplenerds #researchersresearchingresearchers #uxresearch #designresearch #researchtools #justinitforthesocks

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🌟The Power of Sketching in UX Design: Elevating Concepts to Solutions 🌟 Exciting read about the importance of sketching in the UX design process! Here are the key takeaways from the article "Real Designers Sketch" by Nate Schloesser: 🚀 Idea Exploration: Rapidly explore multiple concepts to reach innovative solutions. 📚 Communication: Use sketches as a universal language to convey complex ideas effectively. 💡 Concept Over Visuals: Focus on the concept, encouraging open discussions and reducing tension. 🔄 Agility: Enable quick iterations for rapid design evolution based on feedback. 🤝 Collaboration: Foster a collaborative environment by democratizing the design process. 🔍 Problem-Solving: Visualize pain points and solutions with powerful sketching tools. It's time to debunk the misconceptions around sketching and embrace it as a versatile and essential practice in UX design. Remember, sketching is not just for artists - it's a tool for all designers to transform initial ideas into clear and innovative solutions. Let's elevate our design work from pixel-pushing to true design thinking by incorporating sketching into our process! Share your thoughts on how sketching has impacted your design work and let's start a conversation on the power of sketching in UX design. Keep sketching, keep innovating! 💭💡 💬 Share your thoughts on how sketching has influenced your design process! #uxdesign #productdesign #sketching #designthinking --- Incorporate sketching into your design process today! 🎨💡 #designthinking #uxdesign #productdesign https://lnkd.in/eSVHDCJB

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Anyone have UX/Usability research or articles on "DSV" or digital signatures best practices? This has been around for a LONG time now, and I don't want to believe that Docusign is the gold standard... is it? #UXResearch #DigitalSignatures #BestPractices #Usability

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Portfolio tip for design leaders: Unless your values/leadership style/‘how I lead’ slides are unique or clearly showing why they make you a good fit for this specific role, skip all that in your portfolio presentation. It’s a waste of time and if it sounds like what all the other candidates are also doing(which is true 90% of the time), it will make you blend in. Not good: Generic words like empathy, team building, servant leadership etc Good: Super specific values that apply to this role Better: Super specific values that are actually then evidenced in the work you will shortly present

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🕸️ “How do you style the spaces in between?“ As our team assembles components into patterns and layouts, we lack shared mental models for how we talk about spacing and layout. We're trying to figure out how we can be more intentional about creating rhythm and structure at the same time. → Grid systems have been around forever as an ideal, but in the real world things get complicated when nesting components and moving between breakpoints → New layout systems like flexbox and CSS grid let engineers do amazing things, but how can our designers start playing with these concepts → While utilizing the same components across different use cases like admin dashboards and public marketing sites, we have different needs for white space around our content and components 📐 Designing Grids by Mark Boulton was one of the early talks that really blew my mind when it came to thinking about grid design and the web. Highly recommend the history lessons including the reminder of the essential link between your typography sizing and your layout system.  https://lnkd.in/gjqyg_2a 🧮 Why UI designers should understand Flexbox and CSS Grid by Christine Vallaure 🟦 🟠 🔺 provides a stellar overview of the principles of emerging layout systems. Concepts critical for designers include fractional units, one and two dimensional layouts as well as rethinking our use of breakpoints.  https://lnkd.in/gEY64ruu 📜 Density in Material Design is a great example of how a system can support designers to think about the space between content as a variable within components and layouts. Depending on your application your users may benefit from either tighter proximity of elements or more white space. https://lnkd.in/g_V6w-T7 💎 Laying things out is hard. When working with patterns there are a couple of things my team tries to keep in mind, based on these amazing resources. Hope these reminders can be helpful to your team: → When assembling multiple components consider the relationship between your type scale and your layout spacing → Collaborate with engineers and experiment with CSS grid and flexbox to develop a common language so folks know what to use and when → Consider multiple density modes when styling page margins, grid gaps and vertical rhythm to compliment your context and use case #space #ui #design #designsystems #grid #density #figma

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UX leaders: Better understand what motivates designers and how you can help them thrive by taking 3 minutes to read this excerpt from Scott Berkun’s new book “Why Design Is Hard”: https://lnkd.in/ev6XyMss

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