User experience (UX) design happens in the real world. This means discussions of UX need to focus on the discipline's practical goals and how to navigate the inevitable constraints posed by solving real world problems. This week we're reading about the business of UX and ways to improve the application of UX methods. 

What are you reading?

Why Your UX Designer Won't Be the Next Steve Jobs

Being able to conceive and execute superb design should only be a starting point, not an end, for a UX designer, according to this post from our own Matthew Grant. In order to achieve the Jobs level, designers must also become adept at building and presenting solid business cases for their work. Moreover, they need to appreciate that their primary objective is to solve business problems through design.

Making Sense of IA Messes

An information architect’s job is to help make sense of, and manage, complexity. In this interview, Abby Covert, author of How To Make Sense of Any Mess, talks about how information architects drive project teams towards consensus and order

Un-Sucking the Touchpoint

According to the author of this post, Chris Risdon, “The touchpoint has become a central way to view designing moments across increasingly complex journeys." Unfortunately, there is not a universally shared idea of what counts as a "touchpoint," and what doesn't. To remedy that, Chris offers his own conceptual framework here.

Why Don’t You Have a Writer in Your UX Team?

As product designs get more complex, the ability to communicate the story about the product’s development and use becomes more difficult. In this post, Georgina Laidlaw contends that adding a writer to the product development team adds an explanatory layer that’s often missing.

When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods

There’s a wide variety of approaches to conducting user research. Which one to use is highly dependent on the questions that need to be answered. This post from the Nielsen Norman Group is a guide to help researchers select the proper method to get the answers they need.

Image Source (Creative Commons): Juhan Sonin