Imagine for a moment that we are back in the early 2000’s – 2005 to be specific. You are in San Francisco & own fledgling design agency. You saw first hand the highs achieved by those at the crest of the dotcom bubble & what happened to them once it burst.

The design agency you started only a few years early has begun to attract some amazing clients. Celebrities, technology companies like Google & industry giants like NASA. So, what would you say if a new, unproven start-up came to you & offered equity in return for designing their brand & logo?

This is the question posed to the Cuban Council when Mark Zuckerberg & Sean Parker met with them in 2005.

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This episode is the first episode for series 2. If you’re like me, when you think of a company like Google, Facebook or Uber you generally don’t think of the people within it. Maybe you think of their famous founders and project their personality traits onto an imagined company persona.

How do you scale from 6 designers to 120 without breaking things?

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This episode is the second in our mini-series, Design Horizons, where we speak with design leaders from around the world. We discuss issues they believe to be the highest priority in the design and UX industry.

In this episode we look at the UX Design education problem and hear how to schools (plus Google) are looking to fix it.

Originally published on True North.

This episode is the first in a series where we speak with design leaders from around the world. We discuss issues they believe to be of the highest priority in the design and UX industry.

In this first episode we look at diversity and hear how one lady in particular is not only thriving in a male dominated arena, but also helping to pave the way for other women.

This episode features Jeff Gothelf, Jared Spool, Andy Budd, Georgie Bottomley & more…

Originally published on True North.

Envato is an entirely bootstrapped company, creating and managing online marketplaces for creatives around the globe. They’ve been servicing millions of users and growing exponentially for the last 10 years. Now they are faced with a vexing problem of how they deal with aging architecture, unsuited for their future growth, while continuing to rocket forwards. At the center of this conundrum is information architecture (IA) and search engine optimization (SEO).

Originally published on True North.

How a diary study painted a surprising picture.

Most of us do whatever we can to avoid advertisements. Many of us use technology to block or avoid them. So what happens if your company revolves around getting people to not only opt in to see advertisements, but to view them dozens of times per day? This is the challenge in front of Unlockd. We dive into the diary study which was used to test the app and inform the company’s direction. What they found will surprise you.

Originally published on True North.

The Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, sees tens of thousands of children each year. Many of them are extremely anxious about the testing and procedures they need to endure during their treatment. We tell the story of how an app was created, using thoughtful UX, which made a significant improvement in the anxiety levels of, and gave back a feeling of control to, these kids.

Originally published on True North.

When you have hundreds of thousands of users and they are all having a terrible experience on your app you are faced with the kind of viral negativity and mass exodus all companies fear. This is what Domain.com.au was faced with. Find out how they focused on UX Design and a new design framework to turn their disaster of an Android App into an award winning product.

Originally published on True North.