How Leaders Shape The Organizational Culture

From early-stage startups to Fortune 100 enterprises, these organizations share one thing in common -- an underlying company culture. This culture isn’t necessarily tangible or visible, but it flows through every team member from the interns to the chief officers.

Culture can be defined by the ways departments collaborate with each other, how information is passed on through a company, how meetings are conducted, transparency from leadership, and much more.

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Designing for the Enterprise

Bloated, complicated, and fragmented. These are just a few of the many words that are often used to describe the user experience of enterprise software and applications.

These types of applications are built for a company’s day-to-day operations; and when designed correctly, they can streamline workflows, increase productivity, and reduce the amount of rework required to complete a task.

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A Human-Centered Approach to Emerging Technologies

Technology, as we know it today, will undoubtedly be archaic in the coming years. The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), and the Internet of Things (IoT) are a few of the many emerging technologies that will innovate every application and service we’ve become so familiar with. Because of the changing technological landscape, companies -- regardless of size -- will have to adopt these technologies at some point to stay competitive.

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Design Culture: Little Steps, Big Impact

You’re probably not alone if you’ve ever worked for a company that prioritizes financial opportunities over producing and maintaining great products for their customers. Turning a profit is just the nature of business, and has been for a very long time. But who’s to say a business can’t profit from placing the customer’s wants and needs at the forefront?

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Design Thinking Lessons Learned from the Hawaii Missile Alert

All too often, a poorly designed UX is a contributing factor.  The facts are that humans also design the business critical apps that were used during the incident.  And a human at the agency has to recommend or design the app used in this case. And therein lies the irony. It’s often the last person pushing the button that gets the blame.

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Design Innovation: What Apple Gained When They Put Users First

Ideated in the 1960’s, design thinking is now garnering attention as a highly effective business strategy. Due to its demonstrated success within the design industry, many companies continue to adopt  design thinking as a general approach to problem-solving due to its ability to inspire and enable innovation, a key factor at play for today’s most successful companies.

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41 Shades of Google: Intuition or User Experience Testing?

Years ago, I came across an open letter called Goodbye, Google. The letter was written by a visual designer at Google who got frustrated by the constant level of testing and iteration:

“Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case.

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