Thomas Stokes

At this evening’s Charlotte User Experience Group get-together we heard Fabrizio Chavez present on Persona Creation Using Deep Learning. He talked about persona development using qualitative and quantitative approaches, including some fresh statistical approaches. One takeaway is a version of the old “garbage in, garbage out” addage that data quality is a decisive factor. But new stats approaches and more data also provide some different ways to explore persona creation. #UX #UXresearch #persona

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Not surprising: All of the fully booked, hands-on workshops at the Forrester CX Summit—on topics like journey mapping, personas, and related methods—are being led by UX and Design professionals. Even highlighting when and when not to incorporate AI enhancements, for fake information. #uxisntdead #facilitation #personas

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The cost of many research tools has become increasingly difficult for solo practitioners or small research groups to keep up with. User Interviews just published a report on Research Budgets and found that even within organizations Tools and Software are the #1 most difficult budget justification for research teams - even more so than asking for headcount! 😲 Vendors with special deals for individuals or per-project pricing - THANK YOU for facilitating the survival of small research teams. Small research teams are scrappy and creative. They keep research alive in organizations that desperately need real user insights. Research is fully possible without any tools. That's how it originated. We literally need nothing but pen and paper. But a thoughtfully designed tool can accelerate progress and extend reach. They keep us organized, help us collaborate, assist us in finding the right participants, do tricky calculations - and give us a little sanity back when we're rushing to do everything always faster. When they are only accessible behind big annual contracts, they are limited to those in big organizations. And that's a shame.

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ROI of UX = ex-post analysis UX as risk mitigation = ex-ante consideration This stuck with me (among other things) from the great talk that Tara Maria Bosenick gave at the World Usability Congress last week. How are you looking at UX? Discovery? A/B-Tests? Usability-Tests?

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This morning I spoke with the former Head of Product for a FAANG design systems team. During an internal audit, their team discovered something wild: their official palette had 50 colors—yet there were over 1,500 unique colors in production code. This is the reality of design debt. We like to think design systems and headcount can tame it, but the opposite often happens. More teams, faster launches, and sprawling surface areas just accelerate the chaos. Recode is tackling design debt where it actually lives: in production. We’ve already partnered with two pilot companies to help shape our roadmap and beta test the solution. If you’ve wrestled with these problems—or want to be part of solving them—DM me. Let’s fix this for good.

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Is your exec team aware of the #uxresearch you’re running this month? They should be. In my experience, leadership buy-in is one of the strongest predictors of whether a study changes the roadmap—or gets shelved. I use a simple skip-level rule: any project worth doing has someone at least one level above your manager who is aware of it, backs it, and is ready to act. In the carousel: The Leadership Buy-In Ladder: a visual to help diagnose your current relationship with leadership. Then, five moves that help enlist leadership in actioning your research: 1. Involve leaders in research prioritization (15 minutes/month on the top five candidates). 2. Bring leaders into the project kickoff to create shared ownership from day one. 3. Make participation frictionless (quick question reviews, optional interviews, weekly digests, a simple Slack channel). 4. Let the leader define the decision venue so insights land where decisions actually get made. 5. Assign a clear actioning role: have the leader convene the share-out, frame it, co-derive actions, and own a few of them. If you want research to move budgets, timelines, and scope, don’t wait for “approval”—design for participation and decision-making from day one. What’s worked (or not) for you in getting real executive buy-in? Share your best tactics and stories below. #uxresearchers #researchops

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As a seasoned UX Leader you won’t believe the amount of needless errors I’ve seen retailers make when it comes to the peak holiday season. 💔 Black Friday will make or break your Q4. 🎟️ And it’s not your ads or your discounts that decide it. ⛔️ It’s the hidden failures in your customer experience . . . the ones that will quietly put your revenue at risk. ⁉️ Here are my five brutal questions every brand must ask before the chaos hits. And you can read the full article on my website, link in comments

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Most companies say they want design maturity. But too often, they treat it like a vibe shift. Hire a design exec. Run a few workshops. Roll out a component library. Then wonder why the customer experience still feels fragmented. Real design maturity isn’t surface polish. It’s systemic coordination. And it only works when you fire on all four cylinders: 1️⃣ Strategic 2️⃣ Operational 3️⃣ Tactical 4️⃣ Cultural Miss one, and the system breaks down. In my latest essay, I outline: 🔹 What each dimension looks like at scale 🔹 Litmus tests for executive alignment 🔹 Why design is more than a function, it’s an operating model 🔹 How to build compounding advantage over time This one’s for the design execs, product leaders, and founders serious about making design indispensable, not decorative. 👇 Read the full piece “The Four Dimensions of a Mature Design Practice” https://lnkd.in/gt97SnJH #DesignLeadership #ProductDesign #DesignOps #EnterpriseUX #DesignSystems #OrgDesign #CustomerExperience #StrategicDesign #DesignMaturity #UXStrategy #CrossFunctionalTeams #DesignExecution

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If the orienting focus of all your product research, user research, design research, whatever you're all calling it these days -- is simply "The Product" and never shifts to thinking about capturing a holistic enough picture of actual real-world behaviors of people (yes, REAL PEOPLE, not whatever "personas" are dreamed up in rushed socially acceptable planning fever dreams and only allowed to be expressed in the language of pre-existing roadmaps and quarters of groupthink), what you'll be analyzing is the composite bundle of hopes, fears, wishes, dreams, stereotypes, unpacked assumptions and mental models of your organization. Which you know, has value. Some organizations even shift that mental model closer to the real world than others, they're not all bad. You need a collective dream of A Product I think. But how do you update your beliefs with new information? How do you think outside of the box of "a bunch of people deeply commercially motivated to support this product"? What ensures that you're not operating from entrenched groupthink? Personally I've always chosen to try to evaluate whether the products I've built or worked on are fitting into a big enough part of real human behaviors in the world and helping those people achieve their goals. And doing that requires structure. You need to do it in ways that take in human judgment and motivated perceptions, but also are capable of challenging those. Most of us wouldn't take a medicine that was only tested with interviews with five friends of the doctor. But for some reason a lot of product decisions are fine with this. There's a lot of money to waste this way.

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"just because their dashboard is pretty doesn't mean it's good for patients." Dr. Robby from the Pitt (Emmy winners!) about business KPIs vs. actual user experience. reminder that this is your channel for interpreting pop culture through a human centered design lens. (I'm rewatching and it's been better the second time)

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During yesterday’s Futurespaces session, someone asked Emily Bagdatli (from NBBJ | ESI Design) what her experience design team looked like. Her answer was great, it was honest and specific and it got me thinking. At Bluecadet, our team is structured a bit differently. We have three core disciplines - design, narrative and technology. Having a hosted a fair number of agencies at Futurespaces I know our team structure isn’t the same across the board. We definitely have more focus on narrative and content strategy than many, and we lean heavily into technologists, while other teams might prioritize different disciplines. And that’s the point, there’s no one way to build an experience design team. It’s less like assembling a formula and more like forming a band. Some are five-piece rock bands. Some have two drummers. Some are orchestras. Some are solo acts. The “right” team is the one that can execute your vision. It was a great reminder that experience design, like any creative practice, resists rigid definitions. Different approaches can lead to equally interesting outcomes. Posting the recording on our site shortly for those who want to diver deeper into this and other fun XD topics. 

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