Lushai’s Matt Gould becomes a Better by Design Design Coach

matt — Fri, 17 May 2013 02:25:52 +0000

We are really excited that Lushai Auckland’s Matt Gould has been appointed a Better by Design Design Coach. This means that through New Zealand Trade & Enterprise Matt and the other design coaches will be teaching New Zealand businesses how design thinking and processes can be used to build real value into their organisations.

Better by design are, in their own words: ‘ … a specialist group within New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, New Zealand’s national economic development [...]

Lushai gets it’s teeth into Service Design

matt — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 01:38:15 +0000

New Zealand’s Global Service Design Jam participants in Auckland

Service Design is, obviously, the art and science of designing services. Humans have been designing (or at least planning) services for as long as we have been offering them. Every time we make a decision about how we will act the next time we interact with someone in providing them a service, we have embarked on designing that service.

But over recent years people’s expectations of [...]

Auckland Design Coffee Morning – 6 Months In

matt — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:08:13 +0000

Auckland Design Coffee Morning Imperial Lane Café Every Tuesday 7:30am A good idea at the time, a surprisingly great idea 6 months on

Roughly six months ago at the UX Auckland meet up Penny Hagen from Smallfire floated the idea of a group of us meeting early in the morning for a coffee before we start our work days. We put out an open invite for anyone interested in design to join us. Of course what seems like a great idea [...]

Auckland Design Coffee Mornings

matt — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 21:14:24 +0000

Kick Off Auckland Design Coffee Morning:Imperial Lane Cafe at 7 Fort Street at 7:30 am, Tuesday the 3rd of July

Lushai’s Matt Gould and service design force of nature Penny Hagen have started a before work coffee group in Auckland as a chance to caffeinate and have a bit of a design yarn before we all slope of off to our various places of work. There’s no agenda, we are assuming that if a bunch of people who [...]

Semi-Permanent

matt — Tue, 22 May 2012 03:57:34 +0000

The Semi-Permanent conference has been a bit of an eye opener for me. Or rather it has re-enforced in stark detail to me the things that the marketing/graphic design community are good at that we in the user experience community are terrible at and the things that we are good at that they seem to struggle with. It has also re-enforced to me how stupid this gap is, how it makes all of our work much poorer than it [...]

Hello Auckland

matt — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:51:38 +0000

2012 is off to a great start for us here at Lushai with two big developments to announce.

First of all we are proud to announce the opening of our Auckland office. Opening an office in Auckland will enable us to give our Auckland clients the attention they deserve and also widen the pool of talent we can draw on to keep up our standard of work.

Our second announcement is the appointment of a new director, Matt Gould, who will head [...]

Define terminology & jargons as part of your design process

Lulu — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 21:37:06 +0000

The other night, I was up till quite late reading up on a popular portal solution. In the beginning, I thought everything made sense, and I was pretty happy that I “got it”. But after a while, probably about two hrs in, found myself googling or going to wikipedia to find the definitions of every other technical word, even the terms I thought I understood at the start. I found myself getting more and more confused about the thing [...]

Top 8 at 8

Brent — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:43:57 +0000

This was going to be a top 10 at 10 but hey, it’s 8am and all is well. Plus I only have eight links to get through this morning.

So a quick skim through feedly has given me some juicy links for a morning read. Well worth sharing. I was even going to try and organise these but it’s too early to try and fancy IA stuff. Onwards

iPlotz, Could be some competition for Mockingbird Perfecting User Experience Design with A/B Testing

What is UX and how can it help your business?

laura — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:26:25 +0000

Ux stands for ‘user experience’. It can be applied to a wide range of disciplines and we, at Lushai, work it in the online or web space (so far) and work it good.

It is about the experience that you create for your users (these are your customers and other interested visitors or people who stumble across your site from Google). It permeates every facet of web design from your idea to content to code.

To me a great user experience is [...]

A book (nearly) about Interaction Design

laura — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:33:04 +0000

Well this is my first blog post to Lushai and I’m happy to be on the team! Instead of writing about me I thought i would share something a friend forwarded onto me recently.

So there is a guy who is writing a book on Interaction Design and he’s breaking the mold a little on this one by asking the user to fund the end result (that’s the book). Usually this sort of stuff annoys me a little but after having [...]

Links from a breaking the mold approach to education

Brent — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 01:05:57 +0000

I’m back and I’m bad. It’s been like weeks and weeks since my last one. All due to large projects mixed with the small bread n butter plus all the usual distractions that come along.

Our current major project is for a large educational institute so it has brought up a host of challenges around all the facets of user experience (UX) design – visual design, information architecture, interaction design and all the smaller interactive components. The design needs to break [...]

Monday post-it notes

Brent — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 22:07:09 +0000

Slack is the word! I have been trying to write one, maybe two blog posts a week here at Lushai but as you may or may not have noticed, last week was a fizzer. Due not so much to motivation as extreme workloads and baby demands. So here is a short spewage of links and fun for a Monday morning, enjoy

I love it Danny Devito joins twitter and his nuts are on fire. Im following! Introducing Typedia by Jason Santa Maria

Top 10 at 10 no.2

Brent — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:04:42 +0000

I’ve had a resurgence of late with my posterous account. This due to a few reasons. My new iPhone, near new daughter Lola Grace and the excellant Pic Posterous app. Im also taking big steps into the IA world (I believe the saying is chucked into the deep end) so will chuck in a few useful posts for newbies.

Posterous, Pic Posterous and Tumblr Is Posterous the new TwitPic? Posterous Finally Has An iPhone App, Could [...]

Weekly wrap-up number 2

Brent — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 02:27:52 +0000

A small wrap of stuff this week. It’s been a busy one with barely a blink to capture stuff outside of work.

If your into Dj sets as opposed to band albums or tracks check out a new online music startup called mugasha. It’s pretty sweet though I Can’t find Shadow on there yet.

Google maps gets busy using locals to make the maps wiki style. Nice.

Crowdsourcing rocks! It’s what powers my favourite company Theadlesss

Check out this [...]

Top 10 at 10, well 2

Brent — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:56:00 +0000

Ideally this will be a quick post of my top 10 links at 10am on a Tuesday. In this case it’s more of an afternoon slot. Time being what it is not many things happen according to the clock, this is no exception. Enjoy.

Wicked stuff

!Free! Radiohead’s new track “These are my twisted words”.

The new Facebook for iPhone 3.0 app.

Unique tv shows that inspire creativity

Web world

Redesigning your own site. Let me say with the re-design of Lushai [...]

Weekly wrap-up

Brent — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 05:05:29 +0000

This the first of many (fingers crossed) weekly wrap-up articles I will be posting with and insight into the wild world of web as seen by me over last week.

Highlights this week include the news that Microsoft word is banned from Texas?! and This edition is playing catchup as it was started a few weeks ago but I wanted to hold it off until our new site was released. Some of the links a re a few weeks old now but [...]

Brand value and the user experience

Brent — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:54:06 +0000

Like most designers I end up becoming almost subconsciously critical of the things I love. At Lushai its usually my latest ‘user experience’ and most of the time it’s not even digital, it’s anything from door knobs & potato peelers to cell phones and this weekend a new car. All of these experiences adds to the perception of a brand.

Every action builds on the experience of the brand as if it were a person. Recently we have been frequenting a [...]

Why I love Threadless or how to turn your shop into a fashion icon – Part1

Brent — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:43:54 +0000

I have to be honest I’m an online shop-a-holic but I don’t just buy any old thing. I’m an animal of habit and I buy the things I love; mainly sneakers, books, vinyl (the spinning record type) and t-shirts. Like most people, once I cotton onto a good thing, I can’t get enough so I tend to frequent Pick your shoes, Fishpond, Juno and the mighty Threadless.

Now out of all of these, Threadless is the rare [...]

Grateful Post

Lulu — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 00:44:03 +0000

This morning I suddenly realised that I and most of us don’t voice kudos enough to those who have helped us in our lives. I read somewhere that saying out loud “Thank you or I am grateful for [insert name here]” is a great way to make yourself feel better especially when you’re feeling down.

There are lots of things that you experience that shape your life but sometimes there are people you meet that just seems like it was meant [...]

Dawn of the age of the "newbie" consultant?

Lulu — Thu, 07 May 2009 00:46:17 +0000

I am not the best at coming up with names - but my question here is about what i am seeing in the last 6 months...

How are the front and back stages of your service?

Lulu — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:42:50 +0000

I just read about the online shoe store Zappos on FastCompany, #20 on their this year’s top 50 most innovative companies. I was quite taken by their services and their employee policy. I think there are still lots to learn and still lots of opportunities out there if we get the mix right – customers and staff.

They offer “Free shipping BOTH ways, 365-day return policy, 24/7 customer service” – because of this people are less scared [...]

Our Approach

Lulu — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 10:39:20 +0000

I’ve been asked a few times by friends and clients to write up the steps I take to produce the design documents that we give them. This is my attempt at putting a process or approach together. I think these constitute what we usually do at Lushai. I will update and refine it as I work on more projects. I’ll even put in a diagram.

So, here goes…

Lushai’s approach to projects is based on transparency, adaptability to clients’ requirements and quality. [...]

Homepage design principles – Revisited

Lulu — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:42:28 +0000

Posted on Tumblr on the Jan 30th, 2009 3:42pm

Grateful Post

Lulu — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 23:32:25 +0000

posted on Tumblr on the Nov 11th, 2008 12:32pm

Time for planning?

Lulu — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 23:37:16 +0000

re-blogged from Tumblr posted on Oct 19th, 2008 12:37pm

Lushai » All Posts

Lushai’s Matt Gould becomes a Better by Design Design Coach

Lushai gets it’s teeth into Service Design

Auckland Design Coffee Morning – 6 Months In

Auckland Design Coffee Mornings

Semi-Permanent

Hello Auckland

Define terminology & jargons as part of your design process

Top 8 at 8

What is UX and how can it help your business?

A book (nearly) about Interaction Design

Links from a breaking the mold approach to education

Monday post-it notes

Top 10 at 10 no.2

Weekly wrap-up number 2

Top 10 at 10, well 2

Weekly wrap-up

Brand value and the user experience

Why I love Threadless or how to turn your shop into a fashion icon – Part1

Grateful Post

Dawn of the age of the "newbie" consultant?

How are the front and back stages of your service?

Our Approach

Homepage design principles – Revisited

Grateful Post

Time for planning?