The “discovery phase” is one of the most misconstrued areas of product development and of the designer-client relationship.

A request from a client for a re-skin of their web site or application should send up a red flag telling the designer to dig deeper and examine other hidden issues.

I recently finished reading a book by Marty Cagan titled Inspired – How to Create Products Customer’s Love. For all of you who don’t like to read, this is only 225 pages with pithy chapters of only 3-4 pages in length. In short, the book is a gem and has loads of advice from an [...]

For those of us who make a living partly by selling mobile applications in Apple’s App Store, there’s been a lot of concern expressed on blogs and amongst developers about whether or not the App Store is a dependable resource. With over 65,000 apps and more than 100,000 developers, the general consensus is that Apple [...]

A client of mine who wants to make aggressive headway into the mobile space has asked me to make three versions of their current iPhone 2.0 app that includes an upgrade to iPhone 3.0, a never-launched version for Google Android and another one for Blackberry devices (Palm Pre version to come later). It’s my job [...]

A provocative blog post by Cooper’s Tim McCoy titled, “Is Interaction Design a dead-end job?” got me thinking—is everybody now an interaction designer? Just read a few reviews for any iPhone app in the iTunes app store and you’ll begin to think so. One reviewer of the Facebook app for the iPhone wrote: “In the [...]

When designing a Web site, there are industry standards available to create a site map, labeling and navigation. These are as common as street signs: “Solutions”, “Company”, “FAQ”, “About”, “Gallery”, “Checkout”, etc. As users, we have come to expect these standards in the same way we expect to find a produce section and a bread [...]

As the US teeters on the brink of a financial meltdown, I can’t help but to think how often man gets himself in trouble by designing something that doesn’t serve his own interests. Examples of man in conflict with his technological prowess include the creation of nuclear warheads, fossil fuel-run machines, fishing nets that “sweep” [...]

In most organizations, big and small, the answer is obvious: “Marketing owns the brand.” But is Marketing—a creative, yet left brain-leaning and over-tasked department—really up for the job?

Dear CEO, It’s truly amazing the success Apple has had these last few years. I mean, I don’t have to tell you that people just love their stuff. Even their TV commercials give you a warm, fuzzy feeling knowing it’s an Apple ad and every time you’re about to hear an announcement from Jobs you [...]