Ben Holliday is an experienced design leader, writer and speaker. This is his blog (started in 2005). If you’re new to this site, Ben has published a playbook for design linking together many of his blog posts from the past 5 years. You can book him to speak at an event, get in touch or follow him on Twitter.
Seniority in design is about personal responsibility.
A disclaimer to start with. While everyone can take personal responsibility, not everyone has the same circumstances, privilege or types of choices to make when doing so.
But, whatever your situation, everyone can can take personal responsibility for their work as a designer. Continue reading…
“Complexity in the work. Simplicity in how we approach the work.”
Following on from my previous blog post, I’m a big advocate of designing simple models, or frameworks (including working from first principles).
When we’re working to solve problems, it’s the simplicity and clarity of frameworks that can help us to work with subject matters that are inherently complex. Continue reading…
The importance of frameworks is that you focus on a smaller set of things because you can’t focus on everything.
I spend a lot of my time designing, or constructing frameworks as a way of helping others access a way of working that’s anchored to a design process. Continue reading…
Design leadership requires different types of empathy.
We often talk about about the importance of having empathy with end users. These are the people we’re designing for, and the immediate goal for teams working in this way is to understand how people are feeling, as well as what they might be thinking or doing in a given situation. Continue reading…
Back in 2015 I wrote ‘Everything is hypothesis-driven design’. It remains one of my most (and still frequently) read blog posts.
Something I’ve been thinking about more recently is how this translates to user research and ‘discovery’.
A discovery should be focussed on research and learning. Continue reading…
In a design process there are two immediate things that matter*: Continue reading…
As you become a more senior designer with responsibility for other designers, one of the challenges you will face is your personal closeness to ‘hands on’ design work.
As well as how close you are to the work, you will have to think about the proximity you have to those doing the hands on work when that isn’t you. Continue reading…
There’s still an ongoing debate about whether designers should learn to code. I think it’s more important that designers learn to prototype.
Prototyping doesn’t mean that you have to write code or build software.
A prototype should be the quickest, cheapest way you can find to learn about something, or to test an idea or hypothesis. Continue reading…
I’m overdue a book list.
This is what I’ve been reading over the past few months (stretching back to the end of 2018). The rest of this list is books I’m planning to read over the next few months. Continue reading…
A mindset is how we respond to the world around us. It acts as a center of gravity. It goes with you. It shapes who you are and what you do, wherever you are.
Billy Joel wrote the song ‘New York State of Mind’ after returning to New York City from LA. Continue reading…