Halftank Fuel - Product Inspiration

Just about every product professional I have personally worked with had some kind of creative interest outside of work. I know many musicians, painters, actors, and dancers in the product space. It makes sense that if you spend your day solving problems, that you would spend your free time solving creative problems. Right now, for me it has taken the form of a messy office that I am trying to organize. I draw illustrations in my spare time, and over time this has meant piles of art supplies...

I recently listened to a great talk from Talia Cotton, a designer and a coder who recently started her own company, Cotton design. I’ve been actively hunting inspirational sources as a balm for current events. As a designer who also specializes in different disciplines, I can relate to a lot of what Ms. Cotton talks about. She is a designer but also codes, and her firm leans into very interesting coding aspects of design. What really stood out to me is what she said about AI. She said that AI...

If you have worked on any redesign project in any capacity, you have probably seen some kind of audit done on the current state of a system. Usually, these audits focus on components as a tool to promote design consistency. I wrote recently about the benefits of rethinking the auditing process to focus on auditing for objects in place of components. By promoting consistent visuals for a system’s objects, that system becomes much more intuitive and easier for users to learn. It becomes easier...

It’s not your imagination; digital products are getting worse. Every day, a big social media or digital service announces either price increases or a feature that will make users’ experiences notably worse (cough, AI). For a while, it has been a race to the bottom to see how many awful features users will put up with before they shut down their accounts for good. As a designer, this environment is not why I got into UX design. Our mission is to make experiences better, not more bloated and...

I’ve been a consultant for years, and working for many clients in different industries can be challenging. As a certified Object-Oriented UX Strategist, I have a great tool in my toolkit that helps me understand any new client, in any industry, very quickly. The first thing I do when I get a new client is do a quick-and-dirty Nested Object Matrix (NOM) based on what the new client has made public through their website and social channels. Step 1: Noun Foraging I first go to the client’s...

For me, product strategy, branding, and design are strongly linked: Good design is a good strategy for any product. Good design is also critical to a product’s brand. Any strategy must include plans for making a product easy to access and use for its target audience. However, in daily practice, things like usability, accessibility, and brand strategy end up in the product backlog, forever adding to technical debt. By focusing on adding more features instead of making what they already have...

"Now What?" This week I finished my certification program as an Object-Oriented UX (OOUX) Strategist. If this is something that you are interested in, the course is well worth the tuition. The course is NOT easy, as you will be challenging the ways that you think about products and user experience. You will be looking at products in a systems-thinking way, considering the product as a whole instead of the industry standard piecemeal feature-forward approach. It may sound obvious, but looking...