Rob Cowie | UX Central

Your First Design is Wrong

Rob Cowie — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 13:51:17 +0000

Designing better and delivering faster is the dream of all designers, but it need not be a just a dream. Iterative design is a methodology that can both fast track your delivery and drastically improve the effectiveness of your designs. And best of all it’s not that difficult to implement.

I recently did a talk covering fifty things all designers must know¹, and the one theme that stood out was the importance of iteration. An iterative design practice in which we work on smaller pieces and iterate them continuously, making rapid changes, almost always leads to better solutions.

Great design comes from iterations of good design, and the iterative design process is a powerful way of enabling our teams to design and deliver better products faster.

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2023 UX South Africa Conference

Rob Cowie — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 18:54:35 +0000

Delivered a keynote address on Effective Data Visualisation Design at the 2023 UX South Africa Conference in Johannesburg.

Effective Data Visualisation Presentation (4mb | PDF)Download

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2023 Absa Design Masterclass

Rob Cowie — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 14:27:18 +0000

Presented a talk on 50 Things Every Designer Must Know.

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Eight Concepts from Behavioural Economics for Designers

Rob Cowie — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 09:13:28 +0000

As a designer, I’m interested in bringing concepts and learnings from a wide range of disciplines into the world of design to help create better solutions. One field that has had a massive influence on my design approach has been behavioural economics.

I’ve been fascinated with it ever since picking up a copy of Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational at an airport many years ago. Having previously studied traditional economics with its assumptions of rationality, behavioural economics was a breath of fresh air with its premise that people are in fact irrational creatures.

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Effective Data Visualisation Design

Rob Cowie — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 16:36:57 +0000

I’m currently part of a project to create a design framework for data visualisation across the organisation. This has been a lot more interesting than it has any right to be, and has led me down the rabbit hole of all things data visualisation. In the process I’ve learned how to produce visualisations that have an impact, and it has reinforced my view that effective communication with data has become an essential design skill. Designing with data can be fun — you just need to embrace your inner data analyst.

Today, data communication is everywhere. Just think of how much data you’re exposed to every day, whether it’s on your smart watch, fitness tracker, news shows, banking app, investment platform or even your gaming system. With so much data, it’s become essential for us as designers to use techniques like visualisation design to communicate data effectively.

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Improving your UX and UI Writing — 5 Practical Tips

Rob Cowie — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 13:45:15 +0000

Whether you’re developing an online storefront, a SaaS website, or a B2B presentation landing page, both UX and UI play an important role in successful web design. However, UX and UI writing is often not only mixed up but mishandled by project managers and web designers who aren’t professional writers.

While a great WordPress theme and load times will get you far with cold leads, they won’t convince anyone of purchasing or subscribing on their own merit. Here are some practical tips which will help improve your UX and UI writing regardless of the scale of the project you’re tackling in your web development company.

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Design with Confidence

Rob Cowie — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 14:07:31 +0000

Whenever our design leadership group discusses design team members, I often hear comments like: “She is a brilliant designer but lacks confidence in her ability” or “He is great at creating solutions but doesn’t have the self-confidence to persuade people that his idea is great” or that “She has no trust in her ability even though she consistently produces great work.”

All of us have experienced feelings of doubt and unworthiness at some point in our lives. But when we feel inadequate despite our accomplishments being a result of our own hard work, knowledge, and preparation – we’re probably experiencing something called impostor syndrome.

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Recalled Chrysler Gearshift Design

Rob Cowie — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 19:32:39 +0000

https://uxcentral.com/videos/chrysler-gear.mp4

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Guerilla User Testing

Rob Cowie — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 20:12:13 +0000

https://uxcentral.com/videos/129-guerilla.mp4

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Online Checkout in Real Life

Rob Cowie — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 20:04:17 +0000

https://uxcentral.com/videos/33-checkout.mp4

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