Overview
We’ve come a long way with our human-centred design practices since their formative stage in the 1980’s. Over the past decade, changes in the user experience field have been particularly dramatic, with the growing popularity of design thinking. Alongside this, with lean and agile practices, we’re learning to deliver incremental value in frequent small releases. However, this dramatic swing towards agile sprints has introduced some widening gaps in our field of user experience, including our design rigour. Part of the problem is the popular design-thinking and human-centered design process diagrams, which mislead us into design complacency.
In this talk, Paul Eisen will focus on the value of the high-level design phase in developing digital products and solutions, and suggest an approach to achieving graceful evolution of experiences, rather than disruptive change. He will define and illustrate what a “North Star Design” is and show how it can fulfill the goals of high-level design. And he’ll also break down the North Star Design into its five elements, discussing how these elements apply to different solution types and contexts.
Objective
The intention of the talk is to make a case for reversing the wild swing in the past decade towards designing only for tactical functional releases, and to provide a framework for practitioners to use to create robust, extensible designs.
Five Things Audience Members Will Learn
- The forces that have moved the field of UX towards tactical design thinking, sacrificing a high-level design phase
- Why our common design-thinking and human-centered design process diagrams are misleading
- The serious negative impact of skipping a high-level design phase
- How we need to adjust our design process to enable graceful change as we release incremental functions on our platforms
- The five elements of a North Star Design
Target Audience
Anyone involved in the oversight, planning, design, and development of digital products and platforms
