#MCN2018 Recap
Most years, on my plane back from MCN, I am furiously typing up notes from sessions. This year, I was volunteer co-chair and Human-Centered Design SIG co-chair. As a result, I was ever-present but not always there when it came to sessions. However, I had a better sense of what people felt about what they …
Elements of Content Strategy
Content strategy is a framework that shapes all verbal communications and messaging within a brand. It ensures that all writers working with the brand have a cohesive approach while meeting their specific goals. Ideally, the strategy means that every piece of the text supports the overall feel of the organization. Why write to a strategy? …
5 Classic Journey Mapping Mistakes
Journey maps are great, there is no doubt, but there are certain pitfalls that should be avoided. 1. Maps are outputs, not processes: Imagine you and your friend go to a destination wedding. You use Apple maps. Your friend is brand loyal to Google. You both get to the wedding. You are early enough to …
User-Experience Design/ Service Design: Planning versus Feedback Tools
While many people are focused on the testing/ feedback tools, there are other tools that user experience designers/ service designers use to collaborate and plan within teams. These tools can be broadly broken down into tools/ processes that help shape a project (i.e. expand ideas) and ones that refine a project (solidify an idea). The …
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What are Personas and How can Museums use them?
What are Personas? Personas are sketches of sample users that help designers plan products in user-centered ways. Research can be hard to understand. Numbers are not warm and fuzzy, for example. Turning research into an idealized person makes it digestible across the team. The final personal is like an anonymized, fictionalized version of your …
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An Overview of Journey Maps
Why create a journey map? We want to make the path to our experiences better, because we know happy customers are repeat customers. And, are visitors customers? Yes, in this case, they are. They might or might not be paying to participate. But, they are choosing to consume the services we provide. Also, we know …
Choosing the Right Design Tool to Solicit Feedback
While there are many User Experience and Service design tools, people are often most interested in the tools that help solicit customer feedback. These tools are essential in human-centered design, of course. How do you know which tool to use when? This grid helps make sense of the tools. An ideal study balances behavioral and …
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Adapting User Experience Design and Service Design tools to Museums
Many Design tools are often about collaborating to create the best solution for the customer. What professional doesn’t want that? The challenge, however, comes when trying to think out how to use these tools in your workday. These tools and systems can be broken down into many different ways. But, one useful way to consider …
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Comparing User-Experience Design and Service Design Tools
User-Design and Service Design continue to grow closer together as disciplines. There are many process and tools associated with both fields. It can be challenging to keep each of these processes straight, as well as understand how they play out in each discipline. This cheat sheet helps make sense of some of the most common tools.
The Sweet-Spot in Interpretive Approach & the Politics of Mounting Installations
Helping visitors engage in collections is a primary concern for museums. Museum professionals often partner with various vendors, consultants, and partners to do this work, for example commissioning firms to develop interactives for exhibitions. Mounting these installations can be exhausting and rife with interpersonal challenges. Visitors walking into spaces, ideally, have no idea how …
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