Tara Shipp

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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Part of this is also to read the room. Do you consider your audience partners in the design or primarily stakeholders? But overall, this is a great point. What’s the key result and how does it relate to business goals? “Don’t tell them how the watch works, tell them what time it is.”

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🤦‍♂️ "Just hire more designers!" ...said every exec who's never managed a marketing team. Stop throwing bodies at the problem. I learned this $200,000 lesson the hard way. Adding 5 new designers to our team actually SLOWED us down for 6 months. Onboarding chaos, inconsistent outputs, and endless revision cycles. The real solution? We built a template system that 3X'd our output with the same team size. Quick breakdown: • Audited top design requests • Created flexible templates • Trained team on the system Now my designers focus on innovation instead of recreating the same buttons 50 times. Plot twist: We're delivering more projects than teams twice our size. Sometimes the best solution isn't hiring more people - it's working smarter. #DesignOps #B2BMarketing

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I couldn’t have said it better. Design and UX are often seen as nice-to-have resources, leading to their undervaluation and insufficient staffing on Product teams. As a result, we frequently find ourselves stretched thin, doing our best to keep up with demands. Instead of being recognized for our contributions, we’re often labeled as bottlenecks, with teams opting to go around us. Worse yet, we’re sometimes told to spend less time on solving problems and merely focus on making things "look pretty". To my fellow UXers: seek out organizations that genuinely value your work and the contributions you make. I understand that times are tough, and we’re all doing the best we can with limited budgets. However, if a company claims to prioritize user experience, they need to back that up with real investment.

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Designer friends: Do any of you use a 34+" curved display to do your work on? I'd love to know what that experience is like, and what the pros/cons may be as it relates to empathy for users on much more humble/traditional screens, color consistency, multi-tasking, etc. 🙏 #design #ui #ux

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It’s easy to get caught up in functional ratios and its often a losing battle stuck in idealisms. With that said there’s a real business risk when design and supporting teams aren’t invested in. This video does a great job explaining how efficacy and efficiency across product and development teams drop when this happens.

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Hiring for design system roles differs from hiring for other design or engineering roles. Clarifying what makes the roles unique is essential for screening candidates. Here are some nuances that I've found to be helpful. When asking for a presentation, stop using the word "portfolio" and start using "case studies." They tell similar stories but change the expectations from traditional visual portfolios. Include clear bullet points about expected responsibilities; don't just copy and paste requirements from other similar, existing roles. Just because they have the word "designer" or "engineer" in the title doesn't mean the job is the same. If your org still insists on doing a design exercise, tailor it to reflect what you expect from a design system practitioner. The day-to-day is unique, so don't waste time on an exercise that provides no value for you and sets the candidate up for failure. If hiring a design system team manager, you're not hiring an independent contributor and vice versa. Managing and building design systems is a lot of work. One person can't do both roles well simultaneously, so pick one and focus the interview questions on the expected role. What did I miss?

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Like sellouts, many unemployable UX "thought leaders" prioritize telling businesses what they want to hear over what is best for the business, the product/service or customers. There's a significant shift away from focusing on quality in design and user experience, favoring quick production and fake testing instead. I argue that prioritizing profit over ethical considerations has led to serious societal harms, like; Boeing, Teflon scandal, Tesla and OxyContin. Individuals who challenge harmful business practices risk being marginalized or labeled as troublemakers, especially during periods of corporate restructuring or in a downturn. "If you stand in the gap between a business doing harm to the customer, you're going to be labeled as someone who's a problem and you're going to be on your way out. Especially when there's multiple rounds of layoffs. They identify the potential whistleblowers and they're like, okay, we got a boy scout over here on team X. We need to get rid of this guy. He's talking about people's feelings and, doing right by them 'n stuff. I don't know what all this empathy shit is, but we need to get rid of it post-haste because THAT doesn't sound like profit." —Me With Jennifer Blatz. #UXLeaders #Ethics #UserExperience #CX https://lnkd.in/gMFJxnaK

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I want to highlight a problematic practice that's all too common in the design hiring process: - Initial call with a high-level executive like a CTO or CPO. - Assignment of a take-home project based on their product. - The internal team reviews the submission. - Occasionally, they provide feedback. - Additional 2-3 rounds of interviews. While I don't inherently oppose design tasks, there's a crucial issue here: Companies exploit designers by leveraging their skills for free on real products. In a competitive job market, this can lead to multiple candidates providing free labour for a single role. This practice disproportionately affects those with demanding personal lives, such as single parents or caregivers, who simply don't have the luxury of extra time. Design tasks should adhere to these principles: - Focus on hypothetical or unrelated products/services. - Be strictly timeboxed to respect candidates' time. - Acknowledge the limitations designers face, like the lack of access to real customer feedback. Let's advocate for a fairer, more respectful hiring process.

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Isn't it strange how the types of process materials in portfolios is different than how real work is done in UX? I talk about what materials we commonly see in portfolios that are never used in real work, then I talk about some that we really do use. https://lnkd.in/g45JT7Qk

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👀 Designers: Is your portfolio missing this crucial element? New in my "Nessa's Knowledge Bombs" series: "Show Your Design Process in Your Case Studies." As a hiring manager, I can't stress enough: don't just show the final product. Reveal your journey! Read more: https://lnkd.in/eQu4vrTd #DesignPortfolio #UXDesign #CareerTips

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When attending a public UX event, there's nothing worse than having to endure questions submitted by attendees that are extremely basic AND are only presented for someone to be seen and heard while yielding no value. Addendum: Of course, my questions were ignored by the host, while the questions aligned with (misdirection-oriented) crowdthink were exalted and featured. UX is in bad shape today because there are too many people with no UX maturity calling shots and inspiring people to embrace and think in alignment with wasteful mindsets. #ux #realuxtalk Darren Hood, MSUXD

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Config last week was packed with amazing sessions. Here are 5 of my favorite quotes and takeaways 👇🏻 🎙️ Pitching Accessibility like a Pro “Designers aren’t as empathetic as we say we are. If we were, our products would be accessible.” - Tregg Frank Tregg challenged us to empathize with our entire user base, as well as our stakeholders and teams, to promote value and adoption of accessibility best practices within our organizations. 🎙️ A new opportunity to make great software “All around you there are things that may feel solved, but could you do it better if you did it differently today? - Henry Modisett Henry called us to view AI not just as an add-on to top off your processes, but as a reset button to reevaluate the foundation of your processes. 🎙️ How pigeons led to emergency room optimizations “Who do we prioritize - the happiness of our supply or doing what’s best for the citizens? We do what’s best for the citizens.” - Zulhilmi Icksan Zulhilmi inspired us to radically design our products, especially government products, for the public good to impact lives. 🎙️ Unlocking opportunities: building your brand with side projects “The value of side projects doesn’t often come immediately, but in the opportunities that it creates and the personal growth that it ignites.” - Matt D. Smith Matt encouraged creatives to pursue passionate side projects for both the foreseen and unforeseen outcomes they lead to. 🎙️ Defining the relationship (between humans and AI) “The future and things we can create [with AI] is still up for grabs. We can think of something perhaps even better than what we’ve seen in media.” - Sam Whitmore, Jason Yuan Sam and Jason gave us hope that thoughtfully designed AI products can preserve and empower our humanity. You can watch all the Config sessions online here → https://lnkd.in/gXdWy-Ch What were some of your favorite learnings from Config? - - - - - I’m Brendan, and I talk about what it means to be a UX designer, in and out of the 9-5. Follow to join the conversation! #uxdesign #uxui #productdesign #design #figma #config2024

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In case anyone is listening… UX basic tips/101 from a recent ticket buying experience Would you proceed if you got this warning? You should feel good during a user experience. You may never know what upsets a user about the experience until you ask and/or see them walk through it. Like spelling mistakes, sometimes you may be blind to the paper-cuts an experience creates. Minor paper cuts could be the difference from making a sale or losing one. Don’t make users feel bad. Do I seem over 100? ➕Follow for more! Names and places have been obscured 😊 #ux #uxbasics #uxtips #uxr #userresearch

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Org design and how designers fit within cross functional teams has been at the top of my mind recently. Peter Merholz and John Cutler have an idea that in the future empowered design and engineering leads take on the majority of produce responsibilities. PMs focus on product strategy and in lieu of running daily rituals for 2 pizza sized squads. I’ve actually lived a version of this reality and can say it’s possible — with caveats. 1. The product-thinking mindset and skill set is needed for design and engineering leads. 2. A mature design practice with solid design ops is must. 3. Clear alignment and connection with business stakeholders. 4. An empowered insights practice based on UX research, driven by evidence, generates novel growth opportunities while enhancing current user journeys and experiences. 5. Great relationships across product, design, engineering, business. The truth is skill sets and preferences vary so widely that this model simply can’t work for every company or even every team. A full stack PM/UXDev sounds great on paper but rarely plays out well in reality. However, well supported leads could totally pull it off if well supported by practice area ops squads and empowered PMs.

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What are some holy grail UX books you refer to often (other than The Design of Everyday things 😂) you guys would recommend? I’m on the hunt for anything in relation to UX strategy, Lean UX, and accessibility 🤗.

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Check out this workshop series if you are interested in design leadership or wondering what it's about!

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UX jobs these days seem to be interested in people that can prove they can run the gamut of design needs no questions asked. Pre-AI, my biggest roadblock was properly communicating my ability to do high-level enterprise UX. So I spent years learning about process, designing on budgets (time, money, technology, etc.), and negotiating with stakeholders. Enterprise UX actively discourages treating the work with any degree of creativity or visual interest. They want you to solve a problem with as little as possible, don’t add new components, and dumb it down for the engineers. This presents a problem in the Post-AI world, where boot camp design and ChatGPT has flooded an already saturated industry. Jobs need to know you actually know how to design. And no one is going to read your 2,000 word case study. Where does that leave designers? More specifically, me? Imma keep it a buck, I still desperately need a nice, well paying brain job. The current political and social climate means it’s time to swallow my pride and really consider how I get the outcome I want as quickly as possible. I’ve complained long enough. I decided to rewrite my LinkedIn job entries. People looking for UX Designers maybe kinda a little bit know what you might be doing day to day. So instead, I summarized how I spent my time at the job, and put a laser focus on my grand contributions for each role. This gave me an opportunity to brag on my accomplishments. Some of the feedback I’ve gotten from recent job interviews is that there hasn’t been as much visual appeal in my work(Post-AI, enterprise, remember?). So I decided against relaunching my portfolio, and instead, created a Dribbble page to so I can focus on making the presentation of ALL of my work more engaging. It also gives me a great place to showcase my non-UX work. Dribbble is much more about visual presentation than what UX usually strives for, and I like that. Speaking of which, you can view that Dribbble page below! There are only like 3 things in it, as I just started filling it out and I have 10 years of stuff to consider. But it’s there! And I’m happy about that. I’ve been pretty energized about my new foray back into Design, and so I’ll be sharing progress on my rebranding efforts as I go forward. Maybe yall will find it interesting. And if know anyone looking for some UX or Visual Design, do me a solid and send them my way? ☺️ https://lnkd.in/e3jQR93z

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Many designers still confuse a component library for a design system, but understanding the difference is critical for creating scalable, cohesive products. In this gabble of words I've explored how major companies like Airbnb and IBM do it right? 🧐 #UXDesign #DesignSystems #ComponentLibrary #ProductDesign #DesignVsDevelopment #Collaboration #Figma #DigitalProductDesign #TechDebate #DesignThinking https://lnkd.in/gGmxyKED

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