Alex Ruiz is a product consultant with over 19 years of experience in product strategy, product design, collaboration, user research, prototyping, and user validation methods. I provide consulting services that help companies build the right product and services for their customers.
The design community has become over-reliant on familiar tools like Figma, which can restrict creative problem-solving. I advocate for a more expansive approach, encouraging designers to explore a broader range of innovative solutions.
Preparing for the growth of AI tools involves improving how we manage our knowledge.
On occasion, someone reaches out for advice about a career in User Experience (UX). I enjoy sharing my experience in the hopes it allows designers to progress quicker in their careers. One thing you'll find is that people come to User Experience from a myriad of backgrounds, and it's only a matter of filling in the gaps of knowledge.
In March of 2020, the coronavirus became a legitimate concern in the United States. Governors started issuing stay at home orders and limiting the number of people at indoor locations. The vast majority of companies were thrown for a loop when the stay at home orders forced their company to consider going remote.
When I decided to specialize in User Experience in the mid-2000s, tech still felt like the wild west. It was full of people who knew how to teach themselves what they needed to learn to finish their projects. I was a website developer at the time. Many of the developers I worked with were former mechanics, machinists, and tinkerers who discovered they could earn a good living building websites and applications.
A well-known customer satisfaction report came out the week I started a job at a large company. The report had my new employer listed at the bottom for customer satisfaction of their mobile app (amongst other areas). The internal discussion was full of disbelief, because a competitor was using the same mobile solution and they had ranked much higher.
This is a list of resources I've been compiling as I learn more about the Jobs to be Done theory.
Studying Jobs to be Done (JTBD) theory over the last year has changed the way I will research and design products for the foreseeable future. What I used to think of as the “art” of design and design thinking has been driven into algorithm by JTBD.
