UX Central Weekly #2

Lots of interesting things happening this week in the world of UX and digital. We start off with an excellent quote about designers from Mike Monteiro in his article Why You Need Design

The best designers are passionate about design, but dispassionate about their own designs.

Last week we got to play around with Google’s lo-fi Virtual Reality device, Google Cardboard. I believe this is a great showcase for the new frontier in interaction design. Cardboard is intended as a low-cost system to encourage interest and development in VR and VR applications. It was created by David Coz and Damien Henry, Google engineers at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris, in their 20% “Innovation Time Off”, and was introduced at the Google I/O 2014 developers conference for Android devices.

An interesting approach for getting executives to support your innovative ideas comes from the Harvard Business Review.

Despite how much has been written about corporate innovation, it still presents a big challenge. On one hand, senior executives encourage employees to develop new products and services. On the other, they don’t want to throw money at concepts with limited market potential. So how can internal innovators create confidence in the viability of their ideas as they’re still evolving? One way is to get customers to help you make your case.

Innovators in established organisations need as many allies as possible to bring their ideas to life. Few are as powerful as customers.