Strategy | Akendi UX Reflections

Beware of UX Charlatans

By Michelle Brown

14.09.2017

The television faith healers of the digital era. The Rise of the Charlatans A lot of companies are becoming more familiar with the terms “UX”, “User Experience”, and “Usability”, and this is great! There’s a growing community of...

Not Choosing Sides: Customer Experiences vs. User Experiences

By Tedde van Gelderen

27.04.2017

Ok, we’re all humans. It is a label that encompasses us all. But in experience research and design we rarely, if ever, create for or try to understand the human. It’s usually the different types of humans we’re interested in. Because...

Grow Up!

By Shaun Illingworth

15.12.2016

As someone on the front end of UX projects, I spend a lot of time talking with clients and prospects about their specific project. I’ve grown into this role because I really do enjoy meeting new people, hearing about new technology and...

Collaboration is a team sport

By Yvonne Shek

01.12.2016

If there is one topic that stands out in my mind in the last few months, it would be the topic of collaboration. We have been asked to help others collaborate and we ourselves also desire greater collaboration in our work. Why is...

Making the Move Into UX

By Foong Ling Chen

11.02.2016

Finding the right career is no small feat. From a design background perspective, I’ll talk about the things I felt were important to keep in mind when looking for the right job. This blog post is inspired by someone who had...

A Brief Look Into the History of Landing Page Design

By Lisa Min

09.02.2016

If you’ve never had a chance to look back through internet archives, I would highly recommend you do. It’s a fascinating look into the history of digital design and it’s interesting to look at the various trends that occur across...

How to Engage Remote Work Teams

By Jessica Ringel

26.01.2016

When I first joined Akendi, I had never experienced working with a remote team via Skype. I had used Skype to keep in touch with friends and family in other cities and countries, but never before for workplace meetings and...

Experience Thinking Maturity: 5 strategies to de-risk the experience

By Tedde van Gelderen

15.12.2015

Predicting how many teams figure out their product requirements has been following a distinct pattern over the years for me. Many times when I find myself in a sales situation, the conversation arrives at how the organization’s team has...

“Another Meeting?!” – How to Avoid This Reaction from Project Teams

By Jessica Ringel

05.11.2015

When those meeting requests appear in your inbox, is your first reaction “UGH! Another one?” As a project manager, I love to organize how we are going to do things and when we are going to do them (with everyone else’s input, of...

Investing in UX research: increasing the quality of requirements

By Tedde van Gelderen

08.10.2015

In my UX consulting life I go through many, sometimes brief, cycles of meeting a potential new client, talk about what their pain points are, what we offer and how we can help address their pain points. In the course of these sales...

A shopping experience ahead of the rest

By Jessica Murray

01.10.2015

Shopping online can be daunting and frustrating, from un-useable checkout processes to boring visuals, most online shopping experiences are subpar. Personally, I now do 80% of my shopping online. I prefer it to in-store shopping because...

The Power of a Good Story

By Michelle Brown

02.07.2015

It was a dark and stormy night and Lynn Weston couldn’t figure out how to turn off her computer. She had just gotten a new Windows 8 system and was concerned about it being damaged in the thunderstorm. Ever since she had heard about her...

IS RESPONSIVE DESIGN GREAT MOBILE DESIGN?

By Patrick Noonan

28.04.2015

The first time in your career that you notice things have changed since you started is a pretty exciting milestone. In a young industry like UX, this doesn’t take long. The biggest changes I have noticed have been in the mobile...

UX as a Silver Bullet

By Tedde van Gelderen

17.04.2015

At some point, in your early career as a UX designer, it happens: you are working on a project with multiple, even many stakeholders that each put in their “2 cents”, their point of view on button labels, screen flows, screen element...

Why Your Designer Should Be Your Best Friend

By Athena Herrmann

07.04.2015

Are you friends with your design team? If not, now may be the time to start working on your relationship! Designers who are not just colleagues – but friends – are much more likely to go the extra mile for you, enhance your team, and...

5 Tips to Wireframing in Teams

By Lisa Min

19.03.2015

Designing intentional interactions is a fun and creative activity that is rooted in research and typically expressed and iterated on using wireframes. There are several different approaches to wireframing in the interaction design...

Back to basics: Why iteration is a critical piece of the User Centred Design Process

By Fatima Kanji

05.03.2015

At Akendi, we firmly believe in the importance of engaging the user throughout the design process. The earlier, the better—better insight, better requirements, better design and less time, effort and money spent fixing things that could...

Lean UX: the what, the how, the where

By Leo Poll

22.01.2015

"Are you 'lean'?" is what somebody asked me recently. The timing for this was pretty lousy so just after Christmas and I nearly replied with a 'not as lean as before Christmas' when I realised that the question referred to our way of...

Elevated User Experiences

By Tedde van Gelderen

08.01.2015

I’m sure we have all encountered new types of interactions in public and office spaces that made us react with a ‘that is odd’, ‘I don’t know what to do’, ‘this makes me feel uncomfortable’. This next one, the ‘smart elevator’...

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