Last year, my brother gave me Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren’s classic How to Read a Book (Adler & Van Doren*, 2014) as a birthday present (a must-read for everyone who wants to truly read). While the book touches on very much every kind of literature there is…

Co-authored with Guido Baena Wehrmann (Guidobw) — TL;DR: Design systems are a crucial success factor for digital businesses, and virtually every major player works with one. Still, they can sometimes be hard to sell to management. Here’s a ready-to-use formula to calculate the ROI of any design system. Design systems have become a standard in the digital…

How Black Swans Can Save Innovation in a Data-Driven World — TL;DR: Data-driven design is a proven success factor that more and more digital businesses embrace. At the same time, academics and practitioners alike warn that when virtually everything must be tested and proven with numbers, that can stifle creativity and innovation. This article argues that Taleb’s Black Swan theory can…

TL;DR: To what extent do digital designers and user researchers in industry make use of AI-powered systems to support their work? The answer seems to be “not much,” as we found in a survey with 34 practitioners. In general, there seems to be little awareness of the specific advantages AI…

TL;DR: Digital product design teams are often referred to as “the UX team” or “the UX/UI team,” which are terminologies that can significantly disturb a proper understanding of what UX and digital product design actually are and what a digital product design team does. For one, the user’s experience can’t…

P-values and significance are utterly ill-suited tools for A/B testing. — In my previous job, I was responsible for all A/B testing in an e-commerce department. We worked with an external partner and took care of the whole package — from generating hypotheses to developing the tests to providing a report of the results. Those reports were presented to a variety…

UX is an elusive thing. — TL;DR: In this article, I review six metrics commonly used to measure UX: conversion rate (CR), average order value (AOV), task success rate, time on task, Net Promoter Score® (NPS), and the System Usability Scale (SUS). CR, AOV, and NPS do not fulfil the definition of a UX metric while…