Harrison Wheeler

It’s time to unf*ck your user onboarding. Here’s what you DO NOT need: 🛑 Generic tutorials 🛑 Complicated processes 🛑 Every possible user info What you DO need: ✅ Understand your users & collect feedback ✅ Create a clear onboarding path ✅ Use the right onboarding elements at each stage Stop complicating your onboarding. Stop ignoring user feedback. And get started :) Did you not use an app or tool before because the onboarding was confusing?

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Diversity in design isn't just a buzzword—it's a business imperative. 🌈 As a hiring manager, I've seen firsthand how diverse teams boost creativity, product quality, and profitability. I believe in building teams that reflect our users and bring fresh perspectives to every project. How do you ensure fairness during the hiring process when you have to look at portfolios? Here is my perspective on the challenges of inclusive hiring. #DiversityInDesign #InclusiveHiring #TeamBuilding

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I’ve expanded on my earlier post with examples and deeper insights in a new Medium article. 🚀 In this extended version, I dive deeper into balancing autonomy with strategic alignment, guiding teams like a fleet of ships, and setting the stage for cross-functional success. If these leadership themes resonate with you, I’d love for you to explore the full article here : https://lnkd.in/g_q2Yxfk Let me know your thoughts!

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On this week's episode of What is Wrong with Hiring, I chat with Senior Product Design Manager and generous UX community contributor Mitchell Clements! Mitch shares how he created an attentive, fair, and effective hiring process to scale his 26-person (and counting!) design team at nCino, Inc. UX hiring managers and job seekers will appreciate Mitch's reflections on: - Lessons learned on screening and interviewing candidates in a crowded market, from entry level to advanced practitioners - The necessity of implementing a career architecture framework and standardized assessment rubrics to streamline the process and set expectations - The importance of empathy, communication, transparency, and respect in creating a high quality candidate experience - What Mitch looks for when hiring senior designers/IC’s and design managers - Why portfolios should NOT be a requirement for applications! - How posting on LinkedIn can help hiring managers attract design candidates - Optimistic predictions for a resurgence of UX hiring… sometime down the road Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Companies are finally seeing the value of super-senior ICs! But career ladders and expectations for staff+ designers are often unclear, leaving lots of people who reach this level feeling unsupported. To help, I took my own 14+ years of experience as an individual contributor in high-impact roles at tech companies of varying sizes and made a highly interactive course. Join us starting Feb 3: https://lnkd.in/eqg4e2vx We’ll cover: 💡 Common expectations of the staff+ designer role 💡 Effective communication with senior leaders and executives 💡 How to set and uphold boundaries to focus on high-impact work 💡 Techniques to manage up and show impact Over the span of three weeks, you'll build a network of super-senior peers and acquire tactics from me: a designer who's been through these exact challenges. Grab your spot now! P.S. Thanks, Adekunle Oduye, for the kind words!

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"Any tips for presenting design case studies in an interview?" a friend recently asked. Most certainly. ✦ Don't bury the outcome with a big reveal. Many times I've watched patiently as designers wait until the end to share the final outcome of their labors, first sharing their process (which is typically the same as every other candidate), sketches, post-its, and so forth. INSTEAD: Lead with a few screens that best represent the outcome. You can do this in 10 seconds. And then avoid the next mistake... ✦ Don't jump straight into your process. See note above. Your process is probably identical to every other candidate. This does little to set you apart. INSTEAD: State the problem clearly you were trying to solve. Clarity about the problem is a designer after my own heart. It shows clear intention to solve user/business needs. ✦ Don't show me personas. Some will disagree with this advice. But as a seasoned design leader, few things leave me more concerned about the inputs to your design work than fictitious avatars, names, and bios. INSTEAD: State the target audience you were designing for. If necessary describe the inputs to identifying this audience. Then follow up with how your work met or exceeded the needs of this audience. (Even better, stop using personas altogether and use archetypes or JTBDs instead.) BONUS TIPS ✨ ✦ If multiple designers worked on the same screen, be upfront about this and clarify what your role was. Personally I find it to be a bit of a letdown when something looks/functions great, only to find out later in our discussion that another designer did part of the work. ✦ Proactively share what you would have done differently if given the chance to do this work all over again. No work is ever perfect. But if you *could* get one step closer to perfection, what would it be. This shows me you're capable of critiquing yourself, which honestly not all designers are adept at. ✦ Provide me with a link to what you're presenting (slide deck, figma). I may want to jump around while you're presenting to find areas that are most likely to help me — and therefore you — discuss the right things relevant to this role. I realize this may be problematic to grant me access, so make a copy and then delete the copy after our interview. Hope this helps.

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If we're not talking about design maturity, agile process, or craft, then us designers are probably talking about ✨quality.✨ I certainly see my interviewer's eyes light up when I mention this magical word. "Design is the one that has to hold the quality bar," I tell them. But what if that didn't have to be true? For a truly high-quality product, I don't think it should be design holding the line. It has to be something baked into the organization - everyone holds the quality bar. Even though "quality" is a slippery thing to define, if we can define it and hold ourselves to it, we can reduce the tension in the org and start to think less about the mere baseline quality for the product and more about raising that bar - delighting the user. I very much enjoyed Luke Anthony Firth's take on how they folded quality into their product building process. Have a read! https://lnkd.in/g4SenmYZ #designleadership #productprocess #productdesign #productquality #designquality #opentowork

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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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More UX and Product leaders need to hear Diana DeMarco Brown (she/her)'s wisdom. Diana is a pioneer in the UX field who takes a thoughtful and nuanced approach to assessing the current state of the tech industry. In our recent conversation, Diana shared many insights, including: - How to evaluate a company's culture during the hiring process - Why private equity ownership can result in design divestment - How Product and UX leaders can effectively influence business decisions - Why we don't need to panic with the rise of AI, but we need to think critically and prioritize regulation during this early stage Link to our full conversation: https://lnkd.in/eemDimVb

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❓ I have a question for product designers ❓ How do you understand that you’ve reached a certain grade or level in your career, such as transitioning to a senior role? Do you rely solely on performance reviews, or are there other ways you evaluate your growth? And what if there’s no formal performance review process? I’m asking because I often get questions about assessing one’s grade or level. So, I’m curious — do you have a similar need or interest in this topic? Let me know your thoughts!

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🗣️ Pssst! Many (most?) UX/Design orgs have way more people than are actually necessary to deliver great user experience. This is something I was first clued into in 2014, speaking with a design leader who had recently left a Silicon Valley software company to run a team at a bank. She told me how the team she inherited had 20 people, but, given her team's straightforward remit (showing balances, transaction activity, and other basics), she should only need 10 folks to deliver a quality user experience. But then she said something that I've replayed in my head at least weekly since then. She said that she was stunned to realize that, given the complexity of her product organization, she actually needed 40 people to cover all the work and relationships. This is when I realized that many design orgs were not "user-centered" or "customer-centered," but "product-centered." And these product teams are bloated (from the perspective of delivering meaningful customer value), which drives design teams to be bloated as well (again, from the frame of reference of delivering user/customer value). What I didn't know at the time was the trend (and cult) of agile transformations and SAFe, which I now believe to be the primary culprit of this bloat. Shortly before I left Adaptive Path, I lead a team that designed the entire ecommerce experience (for desktop and mobile web) for a major brand, including landing pages, category pages, detailed product pages with reviews, shopping cart and checkout functionality, wishlists, address books, birthday reminders, and more. We had 5 people. For a team covering all those things to be effective in-house now, you'd need at least 15, and many would have so much more. I know what I'm saying may strike a sensitive chord in this time of layoffs and difficulty finding work. And I'm not saying we should cut UX/Design teams in half—these teams need to be this size to ensure quality UX is delivered in these contexts. But I suspect the convulsions we're experiencing are in some part due to a realization that these product development organizations are fundamentally misshapen to deliver the kind of value expected of them.

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“Where am I?” As our design system matures, things move around. We’re trying to invest in ways that allow feature designers and engineers to locate where they are within a design system, and where to find what they need. → Multiple design libraries can be hard to track and become confusing when designers and engineers aren’t aware of what does and doesn’t exist in each library. → Every component and pattern has a varying degree of specificity from generic to a specific business context or content pattern and deciding what goes where is confusing. → Theming in Figma is great, but... the current nature of variables can make managing multiple modes across multiple brands challenging. Here’s how we’ve been trying to get our head around reducing complexity for our team and consumers 🏗 Figma file architecture - Having a clear plan for structuring your design system libraries is critical for folks to find stuff. Our early attempts at a highly modular system with numerous smaller libraries were too unwieldy. We’ve landed into a Tokens, Components, Patterns, and Features structure that streamlines the process for everyone. It was super cool to stumble on these Figma docs that deep dive into various strategies for organizing your files https://lnkd.in/dGyN-SQw 🚦 Wayfinding elements - Once designers and engineers are in the files themselves, it's still easy to get lost. We’ve implemented consistent color-coded “file covers” distinguishing design system files from feature files, “getting started” pages outlining file dependencies, and consistent page naming conventions indicating iterations from elements that are ready for development. Thanks to Vitaly Friedman for the reference to Saurav Rastogi's post on Figma file organization which is packed with insights. https://lnkd.in/giBs_Jgn 🎨 Multi-brand variables - Our team has worked hard to figure out the most intuitive way to allow for white-labeling our design system for custom theming. We currently leverage modes at multiple layers of the design system based on their specificity from global to semantic to component to pattern. Romina Kavcic has endless resources for teams who are looking to build out their token strategy. https://lnkd.in/deiMGCe9 💎 Wayfinding within design systems is hard but a couple of things that help folks understand where they are and what they can do → Partner with engineers on an architecture that maps somewhat to their mental model making things more intuitive → Setup wayfinding documentation within your Figma files that orient users to where they are within the system → Map your tokens and variables across your system so that it is clear how to layer modes to achieve custom themes #designsystems #figma #uidesign #tokens #components #patterns

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Not sure how I missed this podcast with Lenny Rachitsky but this episode with Katie Dill is amazing. There's a reason it has 47k views on YouTube. Just furthering my claim that the very best of Lenny's podcasts are not about product development or traditional product management. His best episodes are about design and business. "The use of the word beauty in books that have been digitized by Google has decreased,  like pretty dramatically. And it's aligned with this idea of, "Well,  functionality is king. Functionality is what matters." As if people think about  functionality and beauty as like two opposite things. No, they're not two  opposite things. Functionality is important. And actually beauty enhances functionality  because it does make things easier to use, more approachable, more comp elling to use.  And the other piece of it that is not talked about in business as often is just  the importance of how people feel. Things that are more beautiful, increase trust. You see that  we've put painstaking detail into this, and we care about the details of how something works,  and that gives you assurance that we care about other details that you can't see too." —Katie All I have to say is YES.

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For the past two years, I've volunteered with the DesignOps Assembly to produce their annual benchmarking survey and report. We recently launched the 2024 report and it's a must-read — and not just for DesignOps folks! https://lnkd.in/exNNQRFq Click the link below to get the report now. Or read on for what makes this year's report different… The 2024 benchmark report is the *only* DesignOps industry report to include year-over-year data covering a comprehensive range of factors so you can see what's changed. ✅ Job market and layoffs ✅ Impact and maturity of teams ✅ Job functions ✅ Organizational dynamics ✅ Purpose and focus ✅ Design Systems, ResearchOps, AI and more 💰 New for this year: a comprehensive salary reference guide! Want a preview? Here are some fast facts from this year's report: - 34% of DesignOps teams have increased budget for FTE headcount this year, up from 22% last year - 47% have the same headcount budget as last year, up from 21% last year - 17% have decreased headcount budget this year, down from 30% last year Many thanks to Meredith Black, Adam Fry-Pierce, Changying (Z) Zheng, Harley Turan, Jessica S., Jon Fukuda, Jules Monza, MDes 🕊, Kaysie Garza, Madhu Priya, Nancy Gao, Adrienne Allnutt, and Lillian Szügyi for all their help in planning, analyzing data, writing and designing, and promoting this year's report. Get the report now at https://lnkd.in/exNNQRFq — it's completely free and you won't be asked to give up any of your personal information to get it (not even an email address!). Join the DesignOps Assembly community (it's also free!) of over 7,000 DesignOps folks at https://lnkd.in/eP7gdsxb #DesignOps #designoperations #Designleadership #UXleadership

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Here's a slide from my October 2024 talk about triaging UX, showing a word cloud of several things we can do to help drive the discipline forward. Which ones stand out to you? #ux #realuxtalk #uxtriage

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I'm thrilled to share that my latest product and design discovery article is live on Mind the Product! As a consultant, I've observed that the term 'Discovery' can have varying interpretations across different teams. It's not uncommon to encounter a team deeply immersed in a solution yet lacking a shared understanding of the customer opportunity they're addressing. At Lab Zero, we meet clients where they are and advocate for discovery while maintaining flexibility. We often employ lightweight methodologies to foster a shared understanding, even when work is already underway. Teresa Torres' book “Continuous Discovery Habits” is a guide to developing the mindset and practices that enable teams to discover and deliver value to their customers throughout the product development process. Her explanation of the 'Opportunity Solution Tree' helped me articulate a process for asking questions and bridging gaps when joining a new team. The first part of this two-part series looks at reversing the 'Opportunity Solution Tree' to establish a connection between the ongoing solution, customer opportunities, and business outcomes. The second part (coming soon!) will explore strategies for identifying gaps in your team's understanding of customer needs and the necessary measures to mitigate risks before launch. This series will help consultants, new team members, or a struggling team connect with that all-important why and launch valuable experiences for their customers and their orgs. Have you tried something like this with your team? Feedback is appreciated! If you haven't explored Mind The Product's extensive content library, I highly recommend it! In addition to articles about discovery and understanding customer needs, the community has shared insightful perspectives on product leadership, business, and teams. It's a great place to see perspectives on processes and theories informed by real-world use.  #ProductDiscovery #Design #Discovery #ContinuousDiscovery #Onboarding #Risk #CustomerOpportunity #Value #BusinessOutcomes

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This episode of the Finding Our Way podcast articulates, with such clarity, what’s been on my mind about the value proposition of design as a function. A business could leverage creating a stellar user experience as a strategic lever to succeed in the market, or NOT. The latter is totally acceptable where designers primarily focus on production tasks (like UI designs) in an org that prioritizes churning out features. Yet, it’s a bitter pill to swallow for many designers. They feel disgruntled and get exhausted speaking to the deaf ears about how great an outcome design can bring to the table and how influential they could be outside of Figma. This podcast talks about how many designer leaders are struggling to deal with this reality. As someone who is not in a leadership position, I feel the struggle too. But if I were to stay positive and constructive while prioritizing my mental sanity, these would be some options to consider. - Get hired by a company that REALLY values design (think Airbnb, Linear) - Be extremely good at your craft and find fulfillment in it, regardless of its direct impact on the bottom line—as long as you remain employed 🤷🏻‍♀️ - Elbow your way into cross-functional discussions as much as possible, at least within your team, to find opportunities to demonstrate what you can do outside of Figma. You can help expand the perspective on design that your cross-functional partners have, one person at a time. https://lnkd.in/gjheYY_f

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Empathy in Application Design: Why Great Leaders Foster Great Teams As leaders in product design, empathy isn’t just a tool; it’s a necessity. Empathy fuels the connection between design vision and human need, but it also creates an environment where designers can bring their full selves and creativity to the table. In my experience, fostering a culture of empathy has fundamentally improved team dynamics and the quality of our work. Here’s how I see it in action: ↳ Open Communication: Empathy encourages active listening, where team members feel truly heard. This creates space for honest feedback and innovation because designers feel safe to express ideas and iterate openly. ↳ User-Centric Vision: When we prioritize empathy, we keep our users front and center. Our product decisions are made with their experiences in mind, ensuring we’re solving real problems in meaningful ways. ↳ Empowered Teams: By showing empathy toward our teams, we support their growth and confidence, which in turn fuels their passion and productivity. A team that feels valued is a team that strives for excellence. → True Story... sharing insights from what it's like to be on a great team: In a project designing a web app for elderly users, our team faced a common challenge: most of us were young and didn’t fully understand the tech limitations older adults might face. To bridge this empathy gap, we held “empathy workshops” where each team member simulated age-related challenges—using gloves to limit dexterity, applying screen filters to mimic vision impairments, and adjusting text sizes to the maximum. A few product team members quickly realized the frustration of navigating with shaky hands and commented, “We had no idea how challenging even simple actions could be.” This experience reshaped our design & development process: we made buttons larger, simplified navigation, and enhanced contrast. By stepping into our users’ shoes, our deliverables went beyond meeting requirements—they genuinely addressed user needs, making the app truly intuitive. With empathy as a foundation, we didn’t just deliver a product; we delivered a meaningful, user-centered experience. Empathy-driven leadership isn’t a buzzword; it’s a pathway to building cohesive, high-performing teams. Leaders who prioritize empathy create an environment where collaboration thrives, communication flows, and great design flourishes. #Leadership #ProductDesign #Empathy #Teamwork #UXDesign #LeadershipInAction

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