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Human-Centered AI: The Successful Business Approach to AI
We know the positive impact the right kind of AI strategy can have on a business. But we’ve also seen the ways in which pressure to adopt AI can lead to rushed decision-making that leaves organizations worse off. Before jumping into any strategic AI implementation decisions…
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Designing Products for Healthcare: 5 Important Considerations
In the healthcare space, the design choices you make can quite literally have life-or-death stakes. Getting it right is important.
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Using AI in Enterprise
AI is everywhere these days. There’s no escaping it whether it’s a board room conversation, a conference, or a meme on social media…The question amongst many people, particularly those in larger enterprise organizations with less scrappy flexibility and more risk, is how do we use AI in a way…
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How to Innovate for Long-Term Vision
Even if you manage to set up a brainstorming session to get some fresh ideas out, what often happens is that a few wild ideas will be thrown out, then immediately nixed due to (very real) feasibility or viability concerns. How does anyone get past these blockers to arrive at exciting — yet grounded —…
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What My Cancer Treatment Taught Me About Healthcare Design
Three years ago, I was diagnosed with an aggressive bladder cancer. This type of cancer is very unusual in otherwise healthy 42-year old people, but I caught it early enough that I was able to complete a full course of treatment, and my doctor has put me in the class of patients with the highest…
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Best Practices for Qualitative UX Research
The better the research, the better your plan. Combining the hard-and-fast numbers-driven data points of quantitative research with the broader “why” and “how” questions of qualitative research sets you up to make well-informed decisions that truly speak to the problem at hand. That said, to some, qualitative research can feel squishy and daunting. Protocols as…
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When Technology Meets Healthcare: Practical Considerations From the Field
While every environment is unique in its own way, healthcare might take the cake when it comes to a need for specialized design considerations. There’s a trifecta of challenges: legal requirements to contend with, complex funding pathways, and the fact that what’s at stake might be life or death. How do you build technology poised…
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Operational Efficiencies Through Service Design
Reworking a process that’s been around for a while can feel like opening Pandora’s box. Especially at large organizations, the prospect of reworking something that involves so many people is intimidating. And it’s not just the price tag — the prospect of making a significant change at an established organization usually requires near-herculean efforts of…
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Overcoming Barriers to Digital Transformation
It’s 2023. Most of the low-hanging digital transformation fruit has been picked. We’ve got online shopping, digital media, and online scheduling systems…while we’d hesitate to call any digital transformation “easy,” the more straightforward projects have already been crossed off the list. What we’re left with now are the harder-to-budge changes. We’ve got industries like finance,…
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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…
