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Thoughts and Ideas
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Design Debt: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How To Manage It
We’ve all been there…looking at a product that isn’t quite perfect, trying to decide whether it’s time to release & iterate, or, timelines and budget permitting, holding off until a few more kinks are ironed out. It can be a tough feeling releasing a v1 that comes up well shy of the long-term product vision […]
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Smart Speaking Across Languages
Are there any issues with translating my voice skill into another language? Creating voice integrations for large companies with diverse user groups who speak different languages usually means having a conversation about translation. It’s so tempting to take a design created in one language and directly translate it into another language for deployment. Often, well-intentioned […]
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5 Tips for Maximizing Your Design Overhaul
Tackling a big refresh on a product that’s been around for ages is a huge undertaking. In addition to the redesign work, there’s usually a drawn-out diplomacy effort in getting buy-in, organizing the project, and socializing the change. And while most redesigns have popular support or they wouldn’t get the go-ahead, it doesn’t mean that […]
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Effectively Managing Stakeholders Through Uncertain Times.
Facing ambiguity and building clarity with clients One of the things at Grand Studio we love the most is a good problem to solve. The most exciting problems for us are the elusive, ambiguous, and complex problems packed with the most uncertainty. Indeed, the more challenging the problem, the more rewarding it becomes to solve. […]
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What Big Financial Institutions Can Learn From Fintech
Fintech is on the rise, expected to reach $700 billion in market size by 2030. Customers increasingly want to do things digitally, and they expect increasingly sophisticated tools to support them. The pandemic era catalyzed this shift, incentivizing more of the population to try things online that they might have done in person. The result […]
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How to Score a Rewarding Digital Experience for Sports Fans
Which group of users can provide us with more excitement, passion, and raw emotion other than the wide world of sports? Very few areas of leisure and entertainment feature people pacing around in their living rooms, yelling at a television. Sports fans are simply a different breed altogether. They are deeply connected to the game, […]
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Using Voice Interfaces in Emotionally-Fraught Industries
We’ve had the pleasure (and pain) of working in several high-stakes industries like healthcare and finance, and one truth rings out across any high-stakes scenario: people get super emotional. Unsurprisingly, they particularly get emotional when it comes to their life or livelihood. However, it’s interesting to note that, from a product design perspective, we don’t […]
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Establishing a Successful Design Practice
Design-led businesses like Apple have been inspirational throughout the business and design worlds as an effective way to enhance customer relationships by understanding their needs and advancing business goals. However, the road to truly-integrated design practices and operations within an organization can be messy and put at risk by “let’s just do it how we’ve […]
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De-Risking Software Investment with Usability Testing
By now, most of us have interacted with a doctor or nurse via video. COVID’s increased demands on medical professionals, combined with the need to prevent community transmission wherever possible, have accelerated an already-developing practice in the delivery of medical care: remote patient monitoring, or RPM. Clinicians are presented with many technical service options designed […]
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The Power of Building Emotional Intelligence into Banking Experiences
Money is one of the most powerful drivers of decision-making in society. There are people who devote most of their lives to acquiring, growing, and keeping money. Money, by nature, is emotional to people at multiple stages in their lives. So when Grand Studio is looking to build products and services around something that touches […]
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Scaling Research Through Templates
How to create a tool kit for your team to do consistent, scalable research. User research is one of those things that every company knows they need. Where it gets confusing is how to do it, especially if you don’t have a dedicated person or team. There are many methodologies, and it can be hard […]
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3 Tips for a Successful Conversational Banking Bot
In the banking and financial services industry, where interactions may be urgent and require a degree of emotional nuance, it’s important to provide customers with customer service that is helpful and available whenever and wherever they need them. Given that this can be tough to scale with human resources, many institutions have turned to chatbots […]
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3 Essential Tips for Quality Digital Experience Design
Everyone wants a product that customers love and use. Often, a business comes up with an idea, product, and development to get it out the door, and then…it just sits there. What gives? There may be several things at play, but crafting an intentional and thoughtful Digital experience plays a key role in shaping your […]
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5 Tips for Making Intercept Approaches Successful
As a consultancy, we’re often asked to get feedback from folks our clients may have trouble otherwise accessing. One method we use is intercept testing, a form of usability testing either during or after an event. It can be a quick and useful way to get contextual feedback from people using your products or services, […]
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Why Design Thinking (Still) Makes Better Products
Ten years ago, almost every design review started with an impassioned argument for design thinking or user-centered design. We’d bring out beautiful personas and journey maps and run empathy-building exercises with our business stakeholders. After all, we were fighting for a seat at the table for design! In 2022, it’s pretty much taken for granted […]
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The Importance of Accessibility in Inclusive Design
Most people wouldn’t argue against the fact that accessible design is important. When you exclude or provide a poor experience for people with disabilities, you not only degrade the value of your product you also widen the equity gap between non-disabled/neurotypical people and those with disabilities or neurodivergence. It’s not hard to understand why you’d […]
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How Product Planning Can Make a Difference For Your Business
Every good product, service, and system takes planning — and it’s especially critical when you’re starting a new product line. While it can be challenging to sit down and make a robust, thorough plan in the throes of a time-sensitive and chaos-prone launch countdown, it’s a step that really pays dividends — in terms of […]
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Usability Testing and What You Need to Know
Usability testing is essential to creating any product or service. It helps designers and business stakeholders better understand what is and isn’t working from a user’s perspective. It can be difficult for a team to distance themselves from their work and the needs of the business, making it hard for them to spot errors or […]
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The Challenges of Enterprise UX and How to Overcome Them
UX Enterprise software is an essential component of most major corporations, but unfortunately, it often gets a bad reputation. Enterprise UX designs are frequently clunky, unattractive, and generally not as streamlined and productive as they could be. But they don’t have to be. Working with our clients, Grand Studio has collectively created more user-friendly experiences […]
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The State of UX Design in 2022: What Lies Ahead
Since the inception of UX design in 1993, the field has been constantly evolving, changing, and redefining its core concepts. By keeping abreast of the latest trends in technology, communication, and what’s happening worldwide, teams can create products and solutions that will have a meaningful and lasting impact on the people who use their interfaces. […]
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How to Meet Service Design Expectations in the “New Normal”
Over the past few years, services across industries have gone mostly touchless and digital, removing humans as much as possible. We now have easier remote banking, contactless food delivery, telehealth access, and online shopping for all of retail. With a new normal establishing itself between the ebbs and surges of COVID, we have the ability […]
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Digital Banking Trends – The Future of Banking
The rise of digital banking has been meteoric. As the world has become increasingly digitized and fast-paced, many consumers no longer have the time or inclination to go to a physical bank. Most traditional banking institutions have adapted to this by increasing their online presence and allowing the majority of transactions to be done through […]
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The Impact of Wearable Technology in Healthcare
Nearly 80% of people have utilized wearable technology to monitor their health and wellbeing, and in the past few years, that usage has more than tripled across consumers of all ages. These devices have been instrumental in revolutionizing the way that people monitor their health and wellness, and studies have shown that when people are […]
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3 Healthcare Trends to Watch
If the world’s had it rough over the past couple of years, our healthcare systems and the people who keep them running have had it even rougher. They’ve been responsible for treating huge volumes of contagious patients, battling medical misinformation along with population-wide fear and grief, and reinventing the very way care is delivered to […]
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Keeping Calm and Connected Through Day-to-Day User Research
Moderating interviews can be a fun and challenging task. Between making sure you’re talking with the right people about the right things, capturing information, and decoding it, there is a lot to do! Sometimes interviews are over 30 minutes, some are interactive, some are short, pointed, five-minute intercepts. In the last few months alone, Grand […]
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Growing Culture in a Hybrid Workforce
Let’s face it; hybrid work is here to stay! But, if you aren’t convinced, a recent report discovered that 83% of the 9,326 workers surveyed say they prefer a hybrid model — in which they can work remotely at least 25% of the time. At Grand Studio, we want to create an environment where everyone […]
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Forward-Thinking Design Systems
In the chaos of the everyday, it’s often hard to step back and assess whether your organization’s design system is really working. But coming to the realization that it could be better, and then making the decision to change things around— well, that’s overwhelming. Where should you start? The benefits to reevaluating, maintaining, and evolving […]
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The Death of Personas
Nearly ten years ago, we were asked by a large financial services company to help their innovation group spread the gospel of human centricity. Over several years and many product design projects, we created dozens of empathy artifacts, most notably several different generations of personas. These personas were beautiful objects with big photos and many personal […]
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Introducing the New Grand Brand
Welcome to a new rebrand and a new era for the company. Three years ago we officially renamed Moment Chicago as Grand Studio and became a new company. We had little time then to reflect inward on establishing our mission and values as a new brand, so we very quickly pulled together a new logo […]
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Effectively Managing Stakeholders Through Uncertain Times
Facing ambiguity and building clarity with clients
