People-Friendly Tech

?? Quick behind-the-scenes on our new droid sidekick! We realized our Corginaut needed a buddy pretty late in the game—so I sketched up some options. The more rotund droids were adorable but didn't look quite up to Martian off-roading. ?? Once we landed on the design, it was time to model it for animation, making sure each limb had the right axis of rotation. A little paint, a few details, and our droid was ready to roll (see what I did there?)! One fun touch: the droid's antenna wiggles as it moves, giving it that curious “scoping out the vastness of space” vibe. If you're as charmed by this little friend as I am, check out its dance moves on our animation page: https://lnkd.in/gxiUpa8j

No deep dives today—just a quick shout-out to our incredible team for this standout work. This is what happens when custom tech design + build comes together. From dopamine-boosting splash screens to a powerhouse back end that auto-discovers data sets and makes delivering polished reports effortless, it’s amazing what technology can achieve when you give it the right tools. (Check out the work below, and if you’re thinking about elevating your tech, let's talk.) #ux #softwaredesign #designbuild #datavisualization

Yesterday I wore my Bob Ross shirt. It says “No mistakes, just happy accidents.” While not a mentality I’d advocate for the implementation phase of a project, it captures a philosophy I like for the early stages of design, because it makes space for innovation to take root. When we present a winning app design, it may seem to the client as though we followed a precise path, mathematically arriving at the solution through formulaic application of laws. In reality, our Figma boards are often littered with discarded attempts just off the field of view. But one or several of those discarded attempts probably contains a kernel of an idea that we could use. And that idea sparked another iteration, which may have led to a collaboration session with cross-functional team members, which eventually yielded (after a couple more revisions) a design with enough juice to take the project forward. All of that was made possible by play. Play is different from experimentation. Play involves an element of fun. The reason play is so important is that freed from the constraint that we have to make it work right now, the brain is free to come up with things that probably won’t work, but have some intriguing element within. By engaging with those ideas, we learn more about the properties of the problem and how it responds to different methods. New, even more creative ideas spawn from the original attempts. What’s the best recipe for innovative play? 1. Research early. Gather all of the information you need about the problem. Ask all the good questions. Understand the small aspects of it. The devil, as they say, is often in the details and you don’t want to overcommit to a solution that works at a macro level but falls apart in implementation. 2. Ponder. Take some time to just think about the problem and the people who experience it, without trying to solve it. What is important to them? What do they hope for? What do they fear? 3. Play. Commit to try things with no expectation that this session leads to a solution. You want direction, not quantity. If you have 26 variations on the same thing, you are not playing, you’re fiddling. Fiddling is for later. Try things that are dramatically different from each other, informed by the pondering you did in step 2. The magic ingredients that make all of this work are time and mental space. Some people have guts of steel and can engage in play the night before a deadline, but many of us can’t. Start early, when you can’t yet feel the pressure of having to come up with an answer. Once you’ve played, then expertise and experience come into the game. They help you narrow down the options faster and avoid being drawn in by sexy ideas that just won’t work. And they help you bulletproof it. That’s the refinement. It’s necessary, but it’s not enough. The key to capturing hearts and minds is to connect with people in a way that makes them feel seen and heard. And when do we feel more truly ourselves than when we play?

We have a fake ID and we’re 18! The Secretary of State’s office shows our business creation filing as April of 2006 but I am sure it was 2007. So, as we see it, we get to pass for 18 as long as everyone’s cool and the bouncer doesn’t ask us any tricky questions about our height (wink). At 18, a young person in this country gets to do some exciting things: namely, vote. When I turned 18 (for real), it was also the legal age to use tobacco, so I bought a cigar, attempted to smoke it and promptly vomited in a trash can. Voting would have been more dignified, but there wasn’t an election handy and I wasn’t a patient girl. Of course, what makes voting dignified is knowing what you stand for. That’s one reason we don’t get to do it until we come of age - we need time to understand the world and what matters to us. Here are 5 things ET would vote for if it could: Opening strong and closing strong. Strategy and design sets a project up for maximum impact. Polishing ensures that the development and design work shines in a special experience at launch. Shaving off a few days or weeks isn’t worth the cost to the character of the experience you create. Signing fixed fee agreements. Two parties ought to be able to negotiate what something is worth, define it well enough to stay out of trouble, and sail off happily into the sunset with the client not worrying about an unknown cost, and the advisory firm not worrying they’re going to get their hand slapped for going the extra mile. Insisting on direct stakeholder engagement. If you are a leader, you are likely a visionary, and someone with a strong force of will who can mold things to that vision. You are in danger of getting high on your own influence. To succeed, you need to give those whose lives you want to impact a seat at the table when the problem is being studied. It doesn’t mean you should cede the power to make decisions (you shouldn’t) but you need to ask real stakeholders questions about their lived experience and listen to their answers, especially when that contradicts what you wanted to hear. Working with those you trust.? Be selfish. Who’s your dream partner? You deserve to work with people you respect. Engage them, sell them on your vision, and then get out of the way and let them do their thing. Similarly, for advisors, you should be selfish too. Work with people you want to work with and let the rest go. Going for it (selectively). As leaders we’ve got to have a backbone. If you’re not going to allocate enough resources for a project to flourish, admit that it’s not a priority and redirect those resources to something that is. Find one or two or even five things you can really support and go for it. Give them the time, heart, money and people power to succeed. Consider not only what checks the box but what gives it life. These are things we’ve come to value over the years. For more detail, read the full post here: https://lnkd.in/gNVq6SYp

App development is the business of driving behavioral change. And so it surprises me how often the need to motivate people is forgotten in the drive for change. We assume that merely by supplying the means, people will bend their behavior to our designs. “If you build it, they will act.” But they generally will not, unless supplied with motivation that bests their existing motivation, and therein lies the rub. In this article we explore how we use feedback to drive behavior, and provide some general guidelines anyone can use to be more successful at motivating change. This is of course just one perspective. What do you do to drive behavior through technology? #userexperience #ux #apps #changemanagement #technology #drivebehavior https://lnkd.in/dkiHT_HW