If you’ve been following the polarizing conversations within the experience design realm over the past 20+ years, you’ve no doubt noticed our discipline’s tendency to over-label everything , and our mind-numbing ability to switch en masse to the latest eminent-sounding job title that’s presently in fashion. Not long ago, early…

I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past few years supporting, mentoring and coaching designers and career-changers making the transition to service design. …

(or The Value of Small Scale Creative Projects During a Pandemic) — Ever since I started leading my first experience design practice in 2007, I’ve been a big proponent of not only focusing exclusively on large, highly consequential projects for the client organizations I served, but also setting some time aside to work on smaller-scale, less politically constrained, ‘side projects’, that allow…

November 27th, 2010. A few us got there early, ignoring the bitter cold outside to stick 11x17 paper posters to the doors and poles outside the building, eagerly awaiting Ottawa’s first UXcamp in the 200-seat Lamoureux Hall amphitheatre at Ottawa U. A few more were getting ready inside, setting up…

As preparations for CanUX 2018 were in full swing earlier this fall, we started to look back at our 9 years of existence and we quickly realized that as our community of practice has grown, there is very little reliable data that illustrates this transformation, or can point out areas…

Last weekend I attended UX Hong Kong, one of my favourite UX events on the planet, for the firth time. UXHK is not the biggest UX conference on the international circuit, but over the years it has become the de-facto gathering place for the UX community in Asia Pacific (off…

I’m not gonna lie, I was stoked. Even though I heard things were moving behind the scenes, when I read that title in July, the “Launch of the Canadian Digital Service” I really felt relieved. It was finally here. Not as an idea, not as a vague budget line, not…

If you’re old enough, you might remember a time when the Government of Canada (GoC) was a leader in the online (web 2.0) space. A time when just having a presence on the web put our government in the upper echelon of forward thinking administrations. That same time when we…

I consider myself one of the lucky few (or are there a lot of us?) who have a chance to travel to a healthy amount of experience design conferences each year. There are multiple reasons for this. First and foremost, although I’m an introvert, I realized about 10 years ago…