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How to Embrace Design in 2025: UX Trends You Need To Know
A new year is around the corner, and with it comes a wave of new opportunities for organizations to step up their game in digital strategy and product design. Whether it’s delivering unforgettable user experiences, empowering employees with better tools, balancing needs across omnichannel experiences, or ensuring accessibility for everyone, the trends shaping the future…
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From Ideas to Market: Designing Successful Products
For those starting a new service or digital product, the path to a successful launch and adoption can, at times, seem daunting or opaque—particularly if it’s the first venture of its kind for a company, be they a start-up or an enterprise org. When Grand Studio takes on defining a new product or service, we…
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The Ideal GenAI Design Process
This is the second in a multi-part series about Generative AI, focused on how to set up your Generative AI project for success. Whether you’re new to GenAI, or have your own tactics to share, there’s more we can all learn about implementing this new technology. Hopefully you’ve already read our Checklist for GenAI Readiness…
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Successful Multi-Agency Collaboration
Hiring two agencies on the same project? Here’s what it takes to make it work. It’s not hard to imagine why organizations can be wary of hiring two (or more) outside parties to work together on one project. Will the managerial strain be out of hand? Will they communicate as well as they need to…
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A Checklist for GenAI Readiness
This is the first in a multi-part series about Generative AI, focused on how to set up your Generative AI project for success. Whether you’re new to GenAI, or have your own tactics to share, there’s more we can all learn about implementing this new technology. With the many offerings available now in the GenAI…
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4 Things You Won’t BELIEVE Design Can Learn From Buzzfeed
July: a time for pools, slushies, bike-riding and hanging out with friends. What better way to celebrate mid-summer than to look for inspiration in one of the quintessential lighthearted media outlets? Without further ado, here’s what design – at all levels – can learn from the Buzzfeed approach. Put another way, if not us then…
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Scaling Research by Activating the Frontline
As we continue to seek out ways of reaching people, there’s an often untapped source of research insights who are working with our target users day in and day out: frontline employees. This is a key strategy, particularly when…
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Unsolicited Advice for Leveraging a GenAI LLM
At this point, you’re probably pretty familiar with the AI hype out there. You’ve likely read that GenAI (like DALL-E or ChatGPT) is great for generating both visual and text-based content, and AI overall can be good for identifying patterns, particularly in large data sets, and providing recommendations (to a certain degree). But you may…
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Stretching Lean Budgets Strategically
In the face of uncertainty, many organizations scale back as quickly as possible to alleviate the pressure on their overhead. While understandable, rushed decisions can sometimes be short-sighted decisions, making it harder for those businesses to rebuild once lean times have passed.
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Leveraging AI in User Research
Given our experience with what AI is good at doing (and what it’s not), we knew we could use ChatGPT to help us distill and synthesize a large amount of qualitative data in a recent large-scale discovery and ideation project for a global client.
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A New Way of Understanding Sports Fans
If you want fans to engage deeply, you have to deeply understand what it is that they want. In other words, the better you can understand the crux of a fan’s engagement — how it is shaped, how it’s maintained, and how it grows (or stagnates…) — the better you can cultivate their inspiration to upgrade.
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The 2024 Design Forecast
AI, design cuts, and an economic downturn were the “highlights” of 2023. As far as expectations for 2024…
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Great First Impressions: Leveraging UI for Critical Product Moments
Your user interface is your digital first impression. And as we all know, a good first impression can change everything.
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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…
