I'm a cyclist. I recently crashed on my bike. I wish I could say I went down while contesting a sprint in a race, but the truth of the matter is more mundane. I hit a pothole. It's the cycling equivalent of tripping while walking down the sidewalk. I went down pretty hard. Hard enough to crack my helmet and almost total my bike.

As I was sitting on the curb waiting for my wife to pick me up, I realized three things—I knew I had to apologize to my wife for crashing, I knew I had to go to the ER, and I knew that dealing with my insurance was going to be a tough experience.

As my bad luck would have it, my hand was not only broken, but would require surgery. And that meant insurance bills. Lots of them.



I'm a reasonably well educated person, but when it comes to insurance, I struggle. It's a byzantine system. Deductibles. Co-pays. Flexible spending accounts. Provider networks. It's frankly confusing. You never know where you stand, and whether you're going to get a random bill. I've always wondered why it can't be more straightforward. I know I'm not the only person to feel this way. 

Read More

Pixar is a creative organization we often draw inspiration from. Aerogramme Writers’ Studio recently captured a list of Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling, a list originally tweeted by Emma Coats, Pixar’s Story Artist.

It's a really nice list. And it closely overlaps with what we all do with envisioning and writing into existence what an experience should be.

So I had some fun, took some creative license, and changed a couple our words in [brackets] below to compare the rules of storytelling to the design of experiences:

Read More

As products become services, and services become more thoughtfully and holistically designed, we are breaking out of our digital silos and endeavoring to support a more seamless cross-channel customer experience spanning every touchpoint between the customer and company. But what constitutes the channel in cross-channel? And what implication does this have on the customers' experience when interacting with your product or service?

Read More

Last Thursday, April 5th, we capped off our four day UX Intensive training with the Service Design day. Jamin Hegemen lead the activity-packed day, introducing principles and methods designed to help organizations orchestrate cohesive cross-channel experiences for products and services. Just a couple of the highlights included developing service blueprints and mapping customer journeys. Much fun was had in the service prototyping portion, as participants used acting as a means of prototyping service experiences. 

Read More

I want to take a moment to have a deeper, more reflective conversation about the role that sketching plays in my professional work, and how it has evolved it over time. A lot of sketching advice tends to be too general (“You should sketch!”), too superficial (“You need to buy these pens!”), or too self-congratulatory (“Look at the sketches I made!”) to be useful for those of us who have already incorporated sketching into our everyday design practice. For me, sketching tends to be a surprisingly philosophical endeavor, and I'm curious to hear how other designers think about their own sketching.

Read More

In September I had the opportunity to travel to New York City and take the stage with U.N. Global Pulse to talk about our work on HunchWorks. Together with Chris van der Walt and Sara Farmer we spoke at the O'Reilly Strata Conference, an event dedicated to the emerging field of data science and the brilliant developers, analysts and researchers who find themselves working with petabytes of unstructured data on a daily basis.

Read More

I had the pleasure of speaking at the Oregon Transit Conference this week in sunny Seaside, OR. This was the conference for representatives of Oregon's many transit agencies. Topics ranged from grant writing how-tos and leadership to the future of public transit itself. 

Read More

Last week saw the latest release of Instapaper, a service for saving web pages for reading later. It seems like a simple thing, but Instapaper has embedded itself into my life surprisingly deeply, and is a must-have for folks who find themselves with dozens of tabs in their browser of articles they want to read, but don't quite have the time for right now. Instapaper also proves quite instructive of how to deliver great experiences.

Read More

One of the challenges of investing in a great user experience is the concern that it can be easily copied — you do a lot of work to find the perfect experience and then your solution is out there in the world for anyone else to copy. So if UX can be easily commoditized, you just invest in it as a commodity, right? Wrong, dude, wrong.

Read More

Tireless and timeless software commentator Dave Winer recently declared that “web browsers are done. Feature complete.” His point is that product categories stop evolving, and when they reach that point of maturity, all that's left are the occasional tweaks to maintain compatibility with the latest platforms.

I don't know if I agree.

Read More