Whether you’re ambitious or just lucky, you will hit a point in your career at which there is no right choice. Every path is a different bet. There is no playbook. Deciding on a vision, deciding on the values and principles you’ll use to guide your decisions, deciding how to proceed at each juncture… this IS the work of leadership. And you’re equipped, even if you don’t have all the right answers today.

Users tend to click the most prominent button, sometimes without thinking too much about it. This can work well for you if you’ve got a key call to action to which you want to drive traffic. But this basic UI tenant can also work against you. Learn why.

Before they know an organization’s language, constraints, and history, product leaders see the user experience like users do. But along the way, their vision loses accuracy as they start to see it the way the organization sees it. Why does this happen, and how can you prevent it?

Earlier this year, Erin sat down with Greg Hickman from Alt Agency to talk about how Slide UX has focused and systemized our UX services. She covered who Slide UX is and what we do, how we slashed through the baggage to focus our services down to a lean, core program, why clients love it, and what she would suggest to other creative leaders.

Learn about a major myth that plagues our industry, an insider tip on conducting your own user research, where Slide UX focuses, how competitive research factors into the UX design process, and how Slide UX was originally conceived.

UX industry pioneer Jesse James Garrett recently published a piece in Fast Company reflecting on the state of the UX design industry 20 years in. This prompted our Cofounder to reflect on her own experience — from in-house UX, to agency UX, to freelance and finally owning a UX consultancy. Has product design become less insight-driven during that period?

Site redesigns can be laborious, but not always for the reasons one might expect. When you account for all of the various tasks that might be required for during a site redesign, you’re able to consider who will handle each of them.

Yes, it’s good business to focus on the user, but don’t forget design matters internally, too. Product teams want to feel good about what they’re working on.

Highly motivated and capable leaders need to think carefully about where to focus their energy. Erin shares a few guidelines for deciding what to keep and what to delegate.

You can easily get so close to your situation that you no longer see it objectively. Inviting someone to look at your product experience with fresh eyes might save yourself the trouble of executing the wrong plan.

For many of our clients, getting to focus on the parts of product management they’re uniquely equipped for is hugely liberating. Finding the sweet spot is good advice for growing products and people too.

You can definitely geek out over the analytics of optimizing conversion, run some A/B tests, and whatnot. But there's also a more qualitative side of it: understanding why users won't or don’t proceed from step to step in an experience. We can study users to understand the reasons for their behavior.

Unless the imagery supports the story directly, most teams don’t want to stop the presses to produce new design concepts for each piece of content. But skipping visual interest makes the inevitable text-heavy page more boring than it has to be.

It’s so common.

At the start of every project, before any work begins, we ask our client teams to identify what it’ll mean for the project to be successful.

And so often, someone says it: "We want it to have that WOW factor."

Your site and marketing are probably all about why your product is different and better than the competition.

But the product itself includes not just those shiny differentiators, but also a lot of the same basic plumbing that competitors have. Maybe users have to add other users. Or they’ve gotta connect integrations. Or they’ve gotta input data. Or, or, or…. At some point along the way, sometimes after lots of rote setup work, the different and better part actually manifests.

When it’s time to start a big project like a new product build or a UX overhaul, one of the first steps for many organizations is project approval. How much will it cost? How long will it take? Sometimes you have to answer these questions before you can spend the first penny.