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.

Bad UI is costly, as Citibank recently learned when an employee accidentally wired 100X the intended amount, costing Citibank $500M. (Source: Ars Technica)

There’s not just one cost to bad user interfaces. The price manifests in various ways: