The business systems your employees use to do their work can introduce a great deal of stress-or joy-on a daily basis. Most organizations rely on business systems that are good enough, but not great. The gaps that those “good enough” systems leave often force employees to use informal, undocumented processes that rely more on human networking and communication than a formalized system. Since the spring of 2020, when many employees started working remotely, the reliance on those informal networks has not only taxed the employee experience (EX) at many companies, it has also highlighted the need for better-designed systems.

I…

When you’re first starting work on an Agile team, it’ll usually take a few sprints to get into a rhythm that feels natural-especially when it comes to figuring out each team member’s capacity. A story points system will help your team to assign a numerical value or label based on perceived size or effort of an initiative, and assign a number of those stories based on what you’ve determined someone can realistically complete in a given sprint.

For example, let’s say you don’t want any one individual to take on more than 20 points total in a two-week sprint. In…

At Think Company, we often start projects by creating a purpose statement to guide our work. The last phrase of the purpose statement reads, “we will know we are successful when…” We usually complete this phrase with metrics of user experience success-quantitative measurements ranging from ultimate goals like increased sales and stronger customer loyalty to increased tool or feature use. But how can teams actually work together to measure these things, with or without an analytics expert?

Oftentimes on UX teams, measurement and analytics seem outside of design’s purview. We design the solution and assume others will find us the…

In the course of long-term, Agile product design projects, it’s common for the team to conduct design research once at the very beginning of the project (if at all). Product teams don’t always see the value in regularly-conducted research, so the user perspective can become lost as work progresses. This lack of discovery or testing can leave designers, developers, and leaders scratching their heads, wondering why they’re spending time on certain features and initiatives.

You may be asking yourself the same questions over and over again:

• How can we get designs in front of stakeholders sooner?
• How can we make…

It’s never too early to start thinking about the holiday season, right? For Sleigh, one of our most cheery clients, they never stop thinking about it.

Sleigh is a digital service that helps families spend less time on the holiday chaos and more time enjoying the season. Their goal is to take the headache out of gift giving by providing local, short-term storage space and a personalized gift inventory for all of your holiday purchases.

Sleigh launched in 2019 with a small cohort of customers as a test pilot, and it was a smashing success with a 100% customer satisfaction…

Many creative teams have adjusted to a semi or fully-remote model this year-and perhaps for the foreseeable future. It’s also a reality that remote creative roles may become more of the norm moving forward. With this shift, it’s clear that many of our former rituals, habits, and sources of inspiration for leading creative work don’t and can’t look the same anymore.

At Think Company, remote work has been built into our team’s structure and daily operations. But in the moments when we most need to collaborate on a project, task, or solution, we prefer getting the team together—in person—around a…

FiveThirtyEight is a website that produces data-oriented content on current events in politics, economics, and sports. Much of their content uses a unique statistical methodology developed by Nate Silver, Editor in Chief. Because their content is data-rich, they focus on presenting information in a visually-digestible way. For many of us in the UX and design field, Nate Silver and the team have been a regular source of inspiration in design and data visualization over the years.

When I started working at Think Company in 2008, it was a presidential election year and I was obsessed with the election. I started…

Jumping into a new design research effort often brings anticipation, excitement, and the potential to discover unmet opportunities and new directions to take a project. This potential is always grounded in a solid research strategy-the goals, methods, and people, all planned out.

But in the course of a research project, designers are usually looking to learn from many different people: business leaders, employees, customers, and anyone else with a perspective that gives insight into the core questions and goals. …