Halftank Fuel - Product Inspiration

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...

I'm almost re-certified! I wanted to go over how I prioritized this app I’ve been working on to help people manage home improvement projects. I am almost ready to sketch out my solution and I wanted to go over why I went through this process instead of sketching at the very start of a project as many designers do. I’ve been a designer of both websites and apps for a very long time and what I’m trying to do with this process, the object-oriented user experience process, is getting clarity on...

In the messy middle I’m a little past halfway through earning my Object-Oriented UX (OOUX) Strategist re-certification. I thought it would be easier than the first time around since I had done this before. Of course, I was wrong! What makes this process challenging, and ultimately worthwhile, is that thinking through a system before designing it for me has been a process of unlearning processes that do not serve me (or my teams) well anymore. I have been creating systems for over 20 years...

Getting started with getting #PoweredByORCA I’m about halfway through my re-certification process as an OOUX strategist and just like the first time I went through this training, it is very worth the money. As part of this course, we do all of the 16 steps of the ORCA process to become part of a solid case study. So far, we’ve been going through the first part of the ORCA process, the O part, as in identifying the nouns. For my case study, I chose to create a potential new product. The...

Have you ever played with Legos as a team-building exercise? I worked on a huge digital transformation project a few years ago. In the beginning stages of the project we all - around 200 of us - did team-building activities. A big component of these activities was introducing play into the activities, which made a lot of sense as we would be tasked with building a large piece of software. Creativity was being encouraged, as it would be a life-saver later on. One of these games was to break us...

OOUX changed my life, for real. The most common reaction when I talk about Object-Oriented UX (OOUX) to someone is a puzzled look. I get these looks most often from fellow UX and product designers, which still surprises me. By the excited way I talk about OOUX, they may even think that I am part of some cult. I’ve been a designer for so long and you might wonder why I am so committed to using OOUX with every client I have. After all, OOUX is the foundation of my business. So I wanted to share...