Escaping the Bad Design Echo Chamber: 4 Easy Steps

Just because you saw it on the internet, doesn’t mean it’s good design.

Many of today’s UX designers are new to the field, self taught, or straight out of boot camp. Others of us are overtaxed with projects or leashed by short timelines for deliverables. In cases like this, we look online for existing work to inform our design choices. What many of us may not realize when we do this is how much bad design there is out there, and that we may be using it to our own disadvantage.

As the UX profession grows and demands on our teams increase, the tendency to use designs without checking them for their potential success with our specific users becomes a self perpetuating problem – the bad design echo chamber. By revisiting some essential UX skills and applying a critical evaluation, we can move beyond social proofing to good design.

About Our Speaker: Christene Fair

As a practicing UX designer, Christene has worked with a variety of clients from small startups at the Harvard Innovation Labs to large corporations like CVS. Her projects have scaled the digital media landscape from web, mobile web, to native app. She prefers to operate with a Lean UX methodology, embedded with engineering/development, other stakeholders, and product team members to bridge the gap between user needs and business goals.
As an educator, Christene was first a graduate teaching assistant in the Harvard program where she received my master’s degree. After a few terms, she began developing and teaching my own courses – first for New England College and now at Northeastern University.