Get to know us better through posts about our work, our passions and our culture.
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12/15/2023
The Art of DesignOps
A deep dive into what DesignOps is and what role this team plays in the creative process.
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09/06/2023
Takeaways from the 2023 Design Research Challenge
The Design Research Challenge is a 16-week program aimed at familiarizing participants from across the EY organization with research methodology and artifacts through hands-on learning.
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06/28/2023
The heart of asking questions
Regardless of their form, questions are tools that get people to think through things they may not have consciously considered before. This can lead to breakthroughs, such as seeing things from a new angle or challenging accepted statements, rules or processes. The right questions can result in a new understanding, or validating an assumption, or rebuking a hypothesis. They can also lead to more questions for future research opportunities.
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02/08/2023
Synergy
When my colleagues Rob Tannen and Michael McAghon heard that I love painting, they approached me to create a custom piece that they could make a digital copy of for the second issue of the EY Design Studio e-newsletter, Studious. They told me that the section I’d be designing for was called Independent Study and set me loose.
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01/17/2023
Study Halls
Issue 3 of Studious focuses on getting back to work in person at our "Study Halls". See and read about some of our interesting office locales.
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10/11/2022
Celebrating NDEAM
October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM). Employees across all industries are encouraged to celebrate and learn more about the contributions of the disabled community to the workplace. This month also aims to educate business leaders and the public about the need for accommodations.
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09/21/2022
Journey to Crit: EY Design Studio NY Takeaways
Our vision was to create an ecosystem where anyone in need of a critique outside of their engagement teams could have a place to share their work and receive high-quality feedback. We also wanted to make it easier for folks to learn about projects happening outside of their own engagements and offer their expertise and unique perspective. In doing so, we hoped to foster a culture of individual growth through team collaboration.
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08/17/2022
Independent Study
Our second issue of Studious celebrates the independence and the inter-dependence of our Design Studio locations across the Americas, and a feature on our growing Canadian team. Read about our innovation on a healthcare platform and a variety of updates from across our network. Artwork created by designer Diego Alba from our Charlotte studio.
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08/11/2022
Curriculum vs. career: What I’ve learned as a UX designer post-grad
I enjoyed every minute as a design student, and loved studying UX even more. With that being said, no number of syllabi, midterms, or finals can truly prepare you for what to expect in your first few months as a UX designer.
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07/20/2022
When in doubt, improvise
Plan, prepare, practice. Three Ps leading to success … in a world where we could always know how things will play out ahead of time. Often, I am put on the spot — asked questions about topics I have not been able to think through and refine my answer. This used to result in a nerve-wracking experience complete with sweaty palms and butterflies in my stomach; however, I’ve found there are ways to get better at responding on the fly that do not involve developing psychic abilities.
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04/26/2022
Pilot Study
The pilot issue of Studious (re)introduces our international user experience team, highlighting people, work and activities across EY Design Studio.
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04/14/2022
Translating your web app ⇄ウェブアプリの翻訳
Written and spoken languages are the physical manifestations of thought; they’re mechanisms by which our expressions of emotions and logical processes are transcribed from our inner beings to paper. Why does sitting down to organize presentation notes, write a case study or embark on a creative literary journey have such a high catalytic cost to get the ball rolling?
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05/06/2021
Digital Multipliers — Bridging the Digital Divide Locally
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many elementary and high school students to switch from in-person to partial or full-time online learning. This has intensified the existing digital divide in our society, emphasizing socioeconomic and racial disparities in access to essential technology.
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04/15/2021
Agile IRL*
Whether your product owner leaves your team with no replacement, your children now have to learn in a virtual environment, or the job market has shifted while you looked the other way, we can apply agile principles to so much of our lives.
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03/18/2021
How to successfully facilitate a virtual board game
It’s no surprise that playing a board game with a large group of people is a bit more challenging these days. However, we didn’t let that stop us from not only trying it, but also having fun with it.
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03/10/2021
Welcome to your first year, Developer
Welcome to your first year as a user experience (UX) software developer. The first step from the known to the unknown will undoubtedly be accompanied by a plethora of questions, including these two: How will my knowledge transfer? What sort of hurdles can I expect to encounter along the way? Let’s get to business.
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09/28/2020
Can you see my screen?
When we conduct usability research, we listen for feedback about where people might be facing challenges interacting with their digital tools. With online meeting applications, users are verbalizing their struggles, nonstop.
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04/17/2020
5 Ways to Help Your Design Team Work Remotely
Like most businesses around the world, our studio has found its team members in a drastically new work environment: our homes. How can an inherently collaborative process — UX design — work when colleagues are dispersed?
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02/11/2020
Play in Difficult Times
Do you like playing board games? Have you ever struggled to talk about a difficult topic with someone? What could these two things possibly have in common?
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01/24/2020
More than an Outing: Design Camp
In our studio, we are organized in to practice disciplines: UX research, design, development and delivery. We constantly work together to inform and influence the project challenges we take on with our clients.
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01/09/2020
Meditation 101
Everyone has dealt with stress or anxiety at one point or another. Our lives only get busier as responsibilities grow, and sometimes it almost feels impossible to keep up with our to-do lists. So how do we step back from the chaos and cultivate a calm state of mind in both our personal and professional lives?
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12/12/2019
Why Do I Work Here?
When I’m conducting interviews, candidates often ask me why I like working at EY. It’s a great question — a question I may answer differently day to day.
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12/02/2019
Introducing Play into Your Workday
“Go outside and play! Preferably in a natural setting and with as little structure as possible. See you in 30 minutes.”
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11/12/2019
Stay Spooky, Design Studio PHL
Here at the Philadelphia studio, we’re always talking about the importance of play and how to maintain balance within our workday. We’re often helping clients work through complex issues, so we try to find group activities to keep things lighthearted where we can, such as the Collab series our design team hosts every week.
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11/06/2019
Think Like an Architect
First things first: I’m not an architect. However, I did start my college career in architecture school. It didn’t take me too long to realize that path wasn’t right for me, but the early lessons I learned when studying architecture became a strong foundation for how I think and work today, as a UX designer.
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10/23/2019
3 Design Takeaways from 99U
Recently I had the pleasure of attending the annual 99U conference in the city of dreams, New York City. “99U” stems from the Thomas Edison quote, “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.”
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10/16/2019
Personas at Play
You might have a heard a thing or two about Design Studio PHL’s Collab series. Earlier this year, we decided to take things to the next level and invite the community to come play at the studio for a Design Brew event. Instead of a series of presentations, we had our guests participate in three lightning rounds of Collabs hosted by myself, architect extraordinaire Erin Chan and master storyteller Ashley Conner.
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10/07/2019
Design is Storytelling
Earlier this year, EY Design Studio PHL hosted a Design Brew event in Manayunk called Design at Play: Injecting Play Into Our Creative Process. We invited participants to join us in Collab: a freeform practice that offers designers the opportunity to think creatively in new ways and work closely with people they may not typically interact with every day.
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09/24/2019
The 2019 PICnic
An end of summer PICnic (funky capitalization in honor of our studio’s founder, Greg Picarelli) is an annual tradition at EY Studio PHL. Every year after our September staff meeting we head out to a local park to get some fresh air and have some fun (weather permitting of course).
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09/19/2019
Inclusive Content, Ethical Design and All of Us
EY Design Studio PDX Presents: An evening with Sara Wachter-Boettcher (Design Week Portland: Event Recap)
Implicit and unconscious bias impacts all digital products and experiences. Left unchecked, these biases reduce the usability, accessibility and quality of the product or experience.
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08/06/2019
Reusable Collabs
Lately we’ve been exploring the value of personal passions and creative play with our design team’s Collab sessions. During our internal Collab sessions each week, one thing became clear: the work we did, the ideas we came up with and the activities we participated in were too valuable to only be done once.
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04/24/2019
Performance feedback you can actually use
I recently received a structured performance review from a trusted co-worker. The online form asked my peer to rate my most recent 90 days of performance in seven categories, with a rating scale that went from “How did you even get this job?” to “You go, girl.”
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03/26/2019
Crit & Collab
Discipline development is a key focus area at our studio. For those of us on the design team, this means learning about challenges facing other designers and understanding how they’ve approached those problems. We’ve come to realize that the best way to improve our own work is to show it to our colleagues and hear what they have to say.
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02/14/2019
XOXO, Design Studio PHL
Nowadays, our relationships with apps and other digital experiences are looking a lot like real relationships we have with our loved ones. We go through the honeymoon phase, where we are absolutely smitten by clever copy, stunning visual design and functionality that makes our lives oh-so-much easier. We settle into routines with our digital companions and continue to be delighted by the services they provide.
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12/18/2018
Teaching UX Design to TechGirlz
When we tell people, “We’re UX designers,” we’re typically met with confused looks or misconceptions about what that means.
“So you work with computers?”
“Oh, you make websites look nice, right?”
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07/23/2018
Our New Home
One of the many benefits of joining the EY family in December 2015 was that we were able to move our team into an incredible new space. A space that was once home to a leading architectural firm — that we would completely rehab so that it would become the kind of beautiful, functional and creative place that would make its previous occupants proud.
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06/18/2018
Volunteer Day 2018
Our volunteer day this year was extra special for me and many others on our team, as we were able to help out right in Manayunk’s famous Pretzel Park for an afternoon.
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05/19/2018
Front-End Engineers Are Engineers Too
Back when I started my first job as a web engineer in 2000, I was slinging tables-based HTML with laughable stylesheets and the occasional obnoxious Javascript. At the time, I was also a computer science major learning Java, and I knew that the work I was doing in my co-op building web pages was not quite the same thing that I was hearing about in my CS lectures.
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03/13/2018
Introducing Intuitive Art Space
Our team has called the Manayunk neighborhood of Philadelphia home for the past six years. We love its sense of community and its all-around funkiness. But we had outgrown our office and planned to move into a larger space just across the street.
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11/15/2017
Rethinking Digital Design for Seniors
Designers often create digital experiences with millennials in mind, but senior citizens are a key demographic that would also greatly benefit from their attention.
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10/17/2017
Bringing Whole Life Insurance to Life
A look at how augmented 3D visuals can help financial professionals communicate the benefits of insurance products to customers.
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08/02/2017
Transparency and Design: Four Ways We're Evolving Client Collaboration
Our team spends a lot of time thinking about how to improve our processes and build more meaningful partnerships with clients. Inspired by agile methodology, we are champions of transparency — of bringing our clients deeper into our day-to-day work by embedding them in our daily standups, sharing access to our project management boards, and, most importantly, inviting them into our studio for weekly working sessions.
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06/14/2017
Spinning Data into Gold: Turning Information into UX Insights
Brilliant UX designs don’t magically appear out of thin air. Even though they may seem elegant and effortless during presentations, they actually emerge out of crucial insights that inform the design concepting process. No amount of zippy interactions or beautiful motion graphics will save a digital product if we shortcut discovery.
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05/12/2017
When it’s Smart to Play Dumb: Managing AI Recommendations
As machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) evolve and begin to yield interesting results, our clients are exploring how to apply these technologies to their products and services. Their goal is simple: improve the customer experience while decreasing customer service costs.
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03/22/2017
UX Research Sample Size Considerations
Before our user experience research team kicks off any study, we must justify our participant sample size. Clients and colleagues will want to feel confident that they can trust a study’s recommendations, and that is hard to do without faith in the study’s sample population and size. It is beyond, “Did you talk to the right people?” It is also, “Did you talk to the right number of people?”
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02/21/2017
UX Research as a Creative Process
We are User Experience (“UX”) researchers; we research design and design research for digital experiences. Determining what methods will best answer the types of questions that inform and inspire digital designs can take as much creativity as the design itself. The nuances of our tools and techniques are part of what distinguishes UX research from other types of research (e.g., market research, customer experience research). Here are some ways that the EY Intuitive research team infuses creativity into our UX research efforts.