SEP Blog

We’re curious people by nature. And we love to teach others what we’ve learned. So explore our blog to gain fresh insights from our expertise in areas ranging from culture to AI.

SEP Named a Winning Company in the 2022 Powderkeg Unvalley Awards

A Tale Old As Time Humans have had the tendency to be deceptive to one another for longer than any existing historical document can recall. One of the most infamous examples of this act being used as a literary device…

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Circumventing The Dark Side of Design

Dear New Designer

Starting a new career is hard. You walk into a new company, surrounded by new people, and you have so many new things to learn. It can be overwhelming and it is very easy to slip into the imposter syndrome mindset. But, over time, I promise it gets better. Looking back on my journey, I […]

Diagram of outcome, opportunity, and solutions

Planning Features with Opportunity Solution Trees

New software projects often come with a long list of potential features. How do you evaluate these ideas before investing costly resources into development? At SEP, we’ve been mapping potential features with opportunity solution trees. They are a way to visualize the relationships between ideas and their desired outcomes, and to manage the gaps in […]

A sign reading "Accessible Entry" near a colorful mural in Chicago. Photo by Daniel Ali on Unsplash

Why Software Accessibility Matters

I’m a designer with Color Vision Deficiency (CVD). A lot of people, myself included, refer to CVD as “color blindness.” The term “color blind” can be a bit misleading and gives rise to all kinds of funny questions like, “What color is my shirt?” or, “How do you dress yourself?” The reality is, I do […]

designing a medical app for smart watches

Designing Health, Wellness, and Medical Apps for Smart Watches: 10 Things to Consider

For many of us, smart watches have become everyday health and wellness devices: tracking our steps, monitoring our heart rate, charting our workout intensity. They can alert us when our blood sugar has gone too high or too low. They can even call and communicate with 911 dispatchers if we take a hard fall and […]

Designing a Mascot

Picture it. It’s my first day back at SEP after being away for over 5 years. After a crash course onboarding with IT, the Ops Team asked to see me in the War Room. “We have a secret project for you.” What was the project? The new SEP owl mascot, of course! I was ecstatic […]

Breadboarding: A Simple Way to Prototype

There is an awkwardness defining the solution for a software project. Some projects define the solution by generating a backlog of features to implement. They specify what should be built, but create few insights about the user’s experience. On the other hand, a project could start by emphasizing the visual experience with clickable mockups. While […]

Tearing Down the Silos: 3 Ways to Foster Better Collaboration

Collaboration between design and development has historically been an uphill battle. It used to be that a designer (or team of designers) designed a software application, and then handed it over the fence to the software engineers and wished them the best of luck. As you can imagine, this silo approach ended in unexpected results […]

Adding a Design Practice at Lessonly – a Podcast Recap

On this episode of Behind the Product, Jaki Clark and Casey Cumbow join us to share their journey of adding a design practice into Lessonly‘s well-established engineering and product development groups. As design and engineering leaders, Jaki and Casey share the techniques, practices, and systems that have helped Lessonly level up over the past 18 months.

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