The Fountain Institute Blog
ALL ● RESEARCH ● INNOVATION ● STRATEGY ● FACILITATION ● TOOLS ● CAREER ● COURSE JOURNAL
How To Build Your Facilitation Skills (and Why You Should)
Learn how to level up your facilitation skills with these 3 actionable strategies.
How to Write User Research Insights [Full Guide + Template]
An in-depth guide to help you write better user insights with lots of examples and a free template
Keeping Track of Your Accomplishments with a Brag Document
How to use a “brag doc” to capture the small wins in your career and get your work noticed
Why Doing Everything is a Bad UX Strategy
Read this case study on failed UX strategy and learn how to avoid common mistakes in strategy work.
How to Use Chat GPT in Your Design Process: 11 Advanced UX Tasks
Learn how to instantly start using AI in your design process using prompts for Chat GPT, a text-based AI tool
10 Ways That UX Research Report Could Have Been Shorter
Are research reports user-centered if nobody reads them? Read on to see how they’re evolving to be more…designed.
The Design of Really Big Things: Planet-Centric Design
How designers are evolving beyond user-centered design to tackle complex problems like climate change + 7 principles to help
I Fight for the User: Business-Centered vs. User-Centered Design
I want to tell you a tale of two worldviews. It’s a story of user-centered ideals. A warning: if you’re new to UX, this story may seem heresy to you.
The Top 10 Design Method Toolkits Online
Find all the best free design method and activity toolkits on the internet, ranked by a lead-level designer
What is Product Discovery? [Process, Methods, and Benefits]
Learn a system to collaboratively decides what gets built and the process and methods for gathering evidence to build the right thing.
4 Practical Ways to Get Started in Design Ethics
4 practical ways to design experiences that are more ethical [free PDF on “consequence scanning” included]
11 Iconic Product Design Portfolios Before They Were Famous
See what famous designers’ portfolio sites looked like in the 90s and 2000s thanks to the Wayback Machine
5 Ways to Make UX Research Agile
5 steps to lead your team to “continuous” user research so your learning can keep up with agile
Qualitative Design Research: Methods for the Why & How
A guide to the different types of qualitative research methods that you may need as a design researcher.
How to Escape the Delivery Trap (and Find Time for Discovery)
How to avoid designing products stuck in the Delivery Trap of deadlines, deliverables, and pixel pushing.
Visual Thinking Strategies: Facilitate with Art
Learn how to guide the conversation around any visual with a facilitation technique from art education and watch a demo of VTS by the author
How a Live Online UX Course Gave Me Practical Experience
Fountain Institute alumnus Pete Armitage tells us how Continuous UX Research helped him break through the Illusion of Mastery
Generative Research in Co-Creation Workshops
Generative Design Research brings a third element into the "say" and "do" techniques of design research…the “make.”
5 Key Elements to Designing Workshops
Use these five key elements of workshop design to ensure that your workshop event is well planned and tailored to your audience.
How to Use UX Data to Convince Stakeholders
What is one thing you can say to explain your design decisions better? Hint: it has everything to do with UX data.