Abigail Hart Gray

After many years of conducting usability testing for Federal government digital services (my first experience with Federal gov usability testing was on the redesign of USA.gov in 2005...), the well intentioned but burdensome PRA hurdles have been removed! This really is huge news for all of us using #cx, #ux, #hcd methodologies to continually improve government #digitalservices by conducting ongoing usability studies real end users! Jaime Ventura Marli Schaeffer Danielle LaRosa Zachary Metcalfe Felicia C. Jean (Harris) Fox Bernard Pineau Austin O'Donoghue Raj DasGupta

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Had to share this thoughtful article about the conflicting feelings we have as designers with new AI tools.... made me consider the threat of too much standardization over innovation, or letting your own creative instincts atrophy. Check it out and lmk your thoughts

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When Dropbox shifted to #VirtualFirst, my Design team helped lead the efforts to create the new model in a way that actually reimagined modern work. By applying a human centered design approach to build Virtual First—understand what users need, develop hypotheses, design and pilot solutions, observe results and iterate— what we saw as a result was true cultural transformation. This way of working is intentionally designed to make space for creativity, tinkering and deep work, while also reserving time for synchronous collaboration and IRL time when we need it. Through this process, we quickly realized there was a need for more conversation around the unique challenges of working in distributed ways. That’s how we came up with the idea for Remotely Curious—a podcast where we dive deep into the world of remote work and the struggles that come with it. One of my favorite episodes is on the topic of setting boundaries, an art that can take practice while working remotely. It’s something we’re laser focused on here at Dropbox—83% of employees feel successful in designing their own work schedules, but we know our employees want continued support around boundary setting between their work and personal lives as we continue in our Virtual First journey. Psychologist, professor, and best-selling author Andrea Bonior joined Remotely Curious to guide us through the specifics of setting boundaries in the workplace. One lesson that really stuck with me from the conversation was the idea that "clarity is kindness." It’s easy to fall into the trap of people-pleasing, where we start equating saying “yes” as being nice and saying “no” as being “difficult” or creating an uncomfortable environment. But clarity—being clear about your limits and expectations—is actually one of the kindest things you can do for yourself and your team. As leaders in a distributed environment, this is incredibly important to maintaining balance and remaining in control of our work. Creating healthy boundaries in my life enables me to be both a better leader for my team, and a better father and equal contributor at home. By being intentional in supporting myself as well as having a support system, or a “Team Alastair” around me, I can maintain better balance so that I can be the best version of myself, maintain peak-level performance and continue to scale both professionally and personally. I highly recommend giving this one a listen, and would love to hear your thoughts. https://lnkd.in/dn8As9zG #productivity #innovation #futureofwork

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Patterns for implementing human-centric design thinking and UX to GenAI #GenAI #UX #AI

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I really enjoyed this conversation with Alex Smith from Fuego UX on value of designers learning to code, team collaboration, culture, and thoughts for new designers entering the market in the age of AI. Plus, it's short and sweet - just under 12 mins! If anything peeks your interest that you'd like to hear more on, let me know as I may be able to go deeper in future talks or blog posts :)

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🚀 Big News: OpenDesignDocs.com gets a makeover! As we step into 2025, I’m thrilled to unveil the redesign of www.opendesigndocs.com — a platform built for the design community. 🎨✨ Imagine a space where designers of all levels can share knowledge, exchange ideas, and learn from each other. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just starting out, we all have something to give and something to gain. 🔥 What’s new: • A fresh, scalable site built to support this growing vision 🌟 What’s next: • Content from other leaders in the industry • Features that make sharing your expertise seamless • Profiles, analytics, audience ownership 👉 Let's build this together: If you’re interested in partnering to help build this space or have ideas on how we can make it even better, I’d love to hear from you. Here's to 2025!

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"For increased readability, we’ve rewritten sections of our privacy statement with simpler, more consistent language." Is there a better summary of the benefit of UX Writing for privacy related work? Well done, Amber and Heather.

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So immensely proud of such an amazing group of people who've been working so hard on this big set of launches at Figma for #Config2024. ICYMI what we launched today, this blog post recap covers it well: https://lnkd.in/gX3KSWj3 I wanted to share a couple fun tweets from a few of the fantastic designers/leaders that worked on some of the things you may have seen in our keynote this morning. * This is not even close to an exhaustive list of those who worked on today's launches, but just a quick lil glimpse showcasing a few who happened to post about them today (also linkedin obscures the links for some reason, but they're all just fun behind the scenes tweets not shady sites I promise lol): Figma Slides - Keeyen Y.: https://lnkd.in/gmxBH3wq - Mihika Kapoor: https://lnkd.in/gr54Upnu - Natasha T. / Ryan Reid: https://lnkd.in/gd-v9gE3 Redesigned Figma (UI3) - Ryhan Hassan: https://lnkd.in/g868XAze (can't wait to watch the behind the scenes talk with him and Joel Miller and KC Oh as well as Wayne Sun's when they come online later) - Tim Van Damme: https://lnkd.in/gQyvqzYr - Nikolas Klein: https://lnkd.in/ge_kKyvD Figma AI - Jordan Singer: https://lnkd.in/gXmFeXTM - Oscar Dumlao: https://lnkd.in/gkACVY_c - Marco Cornacchia: https://lnkd.in/gMt3BvVY - Vincent van der Meulen: https://lnkd.in/gCrHvcVu - Jediah Katz: https://lnkd.in/gMxEu7i8 - Giorgio Caviglia: https://lnkd.in/gCNVQrKC And more: - Jenny Wen (pages design by rocky chen ✌️): https://lnkd.in/gd_6RHAv - Soundharya Muthukrishnan: https://lnkd.in/gsnibt-j - Daniel Destefanis: https://lnkd.in/gu6mYBe6 - Becca Ramos: https://lnkd.in/gqM7RGKQ We hope you enjoy these updates, and excited to meet more of the amazing community at Config for Day 2 tomorrow! I'm particularly excited for Marcin Wichary's talk tomorrow at 3:40 https://lnkd.in/gvJNNerg

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This HBR piece on "The Art of Asking Smarter Questions" struck a chord with my approach to design leadership. It echoes the Six Thinking Hats method, emphasizing structured thinking and diverse viewpoints. In design, asking the right questions fuels breakthroughs. How do you leverage inquiry in your work? #DesignThinking #Innovation #SixThinkingHats #Leadership https://lnkd.in/ettHPN4c

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⚡ AI x Design Thinking⚡ Just before the holidays, I participated in this great workshop series from IDEO U and wanted to give a shout out. Solid intro on how AI/LLMs can be leveraged in brainstorming/ideation > data synthesis/generating insights > storyboarding/prototyping concepts and some of the limitations/pitfalls to watch for. Good overviews, demos, and interactive sessions + opportunity to connect with a large group of multi-disciplinary folks from around the world. Thanks IDEOU - keep them coming 💡 https://lnkd.in/g5BYDV7r

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Skipping strategy in UX design isn’t just missing a step—it’s missing the chance to lead. My latest post explains why UX strategy is essential to project success and how it transforms designers into strategic partners. https://lnkd.in/gtmnFA7a #userexperience #uxstrategy #businessalignment #productdesign #leadership #designleadership

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2 years with Nectar! 🤘🔥 My favorite highlights: → Our team’s growth from 23 employees to 90 employees. Product alone grew from 6 of us to 21 strong now 🙌🏼, and we’re a sleek, efficient, resilient team under Brian Cressall and Nate Tingey. → Established Nectar’s Design System and built our component library, significantly improving speed, consistency, and quality of design and implementation. → Completed a massive UI design refresh for the existing product (bless the devs still building it 🫡 ). → Launched Nominations, the largest and most impactful new feature we’ve built at Nectar yet. → Completely scrapped a project, because it was the right thing to do. Grateful to work on a team that’s hyper-focused on our ultimate goals, and is sincerely willing to let sunk costs be irrelevant. → Ideated, designed, and launched our new product Internal Communications in 8 weeks with a small, mighty team 🤯 I’m still amazed we managed it. → $40M Series B funding in April 2024 with PeakSpan Capital. → Saw our efforts, motivation, and passion pay off when Nectar was recognized as the 2nd Fastest Growing Company in Utah County, 1st fastest growing software company in Utah, 8th fastest growing software company in the U.S., and 87th fastest growing company in the U.S. (across all industries). → 300% increase in revenue in Q3 2023 vs Q3 2024 (Q3 was also 50% above our revenue Q2 2024). → Saw every department at Nectar grow in excellence. I’m in awe of the caliber of Engineering, CS, Marketing, Sales, and what they accomplish. → Relished the challenge and variety of asks in the beginning as Nectar’s sole designer, including working on print design (looking at you, 28’ tradebooth) and animations for the first time. That animation announcing Nectar’s new logo a year ago? That was my first animation, and I’m still proud of myself for figuring it out enough to make that 😂. → Spent way too much on Holiday gas station runs (RIP old office). This is a long list, but for the record I cut it in half from what it was 😅. I’m grateful Nate reached out on LinkedIn right at the perfect time when I was looking to switch things up, and that we’ve made a great team ever since. Getting to work closely with our little product design team—Nate, Mason, Tyler, and Maya—and many, many others keeps me growing and keeps me motivated on the daily. Nectar’s mission and way of working resonated with me from the beginning. It’s rewarding to see our company continue to gain momentum and maturity, all while seeing how much room we still have to grow. Very, very grateful to be part of the journey. As we say, it’s still Day 1 at Nectar. 🚀

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“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou This truth is especially powerful in product and UX/UI design. While creating a beautiful, user-friendly application might seem straightforward—I've had the privilege of doing it for nearly two decades—the real impact lies in the emotions we evoke. It’s those feelings that turn one-time users into loyal advocates. If you’re curious about how emotions shape user experiences or want to know more about neurodesign, check out this article and others written by @jashsak https://lnkd.in/gtj5JpD6

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“One tool that comes to mind is Origami Studio, which is externally available and open to designers across the industry. Origami Studio was originally created internally in 2014 and has long been a helpful tool for doing high-fidelity design prototyping. Lately we’ve been using it to design AI experiences like Meta AI. We’re exploring ways to make it easier to design prototypes with AI, and I’m excited to see how AI can help us expand access to some of the technical aspects of design work.” https://lnkd.in/gt3NmcSZ

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Incredible!🤯 I fed my site, opendesigndocs.com, to Google‘s NotebookLM and had it generate a podcast about it. It took the context of the site and created a surprising amount of relevant content that sounds quite natural. Why is Google not advertising this! Take a listen: https://lnkd.in/gDQxxBCJ I imagine the next step would be to add different voices, tone, etc.

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I can't tell you how many times I've heard less than explicit dismissals of an idea I've had for a design solution in my career. Yet I never do that to myself. Nope. You'll have to pry my cold, dead hands from my ideas if you don't explicitly present rationale that I can comprehend. I love Ive's quote about the need for a suspension of disbelief in the solution, as solutions are never fully formed. You know, I rarely experienced people straight up poo poo'ing ideas while working with clients as a design consultant. Even in-house, back east, I found people open to explore the possibilities. It was only until I ran into WC SV culture did I find bean counters prematurely attacking solution ideas like a dolt yelling "No one walks like that!" while watching a double dolly shot in a Spike Lee joint. Exhaust your thinking, making, and communicating before you ever give up on your ideas. Solutions, as Ive states, are always incomplete. Keep invested.

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This is a great post for designers moving into management/leadership roles. The nature of your job changes dramatically and it's important to figure out the most effective ways to help your team and the company. As noted in the article, it's very easy to have your time consumed by managerial tasks (operational work). Being deliberate about how you want to spend your time, focusing on the change you want to bring about and working consistently towards that end are critical skills to learn. #UX #Design #DesignLeadership https://lnkd.in/e_g4TRJx

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It's interesting to me that, while engineers are seeing a massive explosion in productivity from AI, product design has yet to see any real progress. Where are the tools from Figma/Adobe that 2-3x the output of a designer? Where is the AI-driven design system, etc.

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As I observed last week at uxcon vienna and frequently hear on client calls, design leaders are increasingly being asked to both prove the Return on Investment (#ROI) of experience design and to achieve more with fewer resources. This growing demand underscores a significant challenge in our industry: we are generally not very adept at benchmarking and proving the value of investment in user experience (#UX). To address this critical gap, we are excited to announce new research by Brent Stewart, entitled "How to Measure the Value of User Experience Design." This study delves into the essential behavioural and attitudinal measurements that every experience professional should be tracking. This research provides actionable insights and methodologies for: Behavioural Measurements: Understanding user actions and interactions with your product to gauge effectiveness and satisfaction. Attitudinal Measurements: Capturing user perceptions and feelings about their experience to inform design improvements. This research is now available to Gartner clients and is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to substantiate the impact of their UX efforts with concrete data. Leverage these insights to not only justify your investments but also to optimize and enhance user satisfaction and engagement. For more information, Gartner clients can access the full report through their client portal.

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