The concept of developing an early, unrefined representation of an idea for feedback and iteration is not a new experience for many traditional designers. Those of us “classically trained” were taught in design school to put pencil to paper before anything else, our teachers imploring us to avoid the computer for as long as possible while developing our concepts. Initial design critiques were always conducted off sketches. I can still hear one of my advertising professors, the late great Stavros “Steve” Cosmopulos, telling us to “make the layouts rough and the ideas fancy.”

Creatively speaking, it’s a sound approach. There’s no inherent limitation in sketching other than the limits of your imagination. There’s no middleman affecting the relationship between the mind and the hand, nothing extraneous dominating the consciousness. It’s just you and your ideas.

There are no shortcuts in

“When you participate in a sprint, you either win, or you learn.”

–Cordell Ratzlaff, Google UX

I’ve had the terrific opportunity to organize and facilitate two product design sprints so far this year. These are focused design thinking sessions that bring together cross-functional teams to thoroughly understand a problem or challenge and ideate on potential solutions in a specific, rigorous way, yielding what I call “informed starting points”.

These informed starting points, or hypotheses/assumptions, are design artifacts that are then synthesized and turned into working prototypes for testing and validation with customers.

Design thinking is not new to designers, but it is relatively new in the context of business and product strategy. Based on IDEO’s design thinking methods, Lean principles as well as Agile techniques, design sprints were pioneered at Google Ventures a few years...

Henry Wolf was a legendary graphic designer, photographer and painter who became one of the most influential magazine art directors of the last century. Supremely talented, witty and refined, he epitomized style and class on every level, an unyielding stalwart of a time when quality and details mattered.

Among his many endeavors, Henry taught at Parsons School of Design for several years, and I was lucky to be one of his students in the 1990s. I even got to visit his Upper East Side studio a handful of times, where I could see glimpses of works in progress. Though he unfortunately fell ill during our class and had to miss a few sessions, what I learned from him during the time he did teach singlehandedly justified the exorbitant tuition I paid. Then and now, I admire the integrity and finesse he brought to both his art and his life, and I’m grateful for the mentorship I received...

One of the things I find most rewarding about working in user experience is the inherent opportunity to talk to customers on a regular basis. Quite simply, it’s built into the process. It feels invigorating to be able to engage in frequent customer conversations as a matter of course, not as a separately-planned activity or a “nice-to-have”.

Several weeks ago I had the opportunity to interview five students about using a new form of online content review as part of their study plan. I’d interacted with many similar students in the past, mostly for purposes of gathering feedback about their study experience for marketing purposes. While it’s always great to hear nice things from a user after their experience has ended, it’s so much more empowering to speak with someone still engaged with the product. As designer and part-shaper of what they are experiencing, I actually get the...