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Accessibility is often focused on how to design and build digital products or physical spaces. But understanding the people with disabilities who will use those products is just as important. Enter ethnography and the importance of research that goes “face to face” with real people in the real world.

User experience, as it has come to be known and understood, is generally associated with the digital space. Designers and developers working in concert to make a site, app, or digital product more usable and well designed. However, a user’s interaction with you as an organization isn’t necessarily confined to just your digital identity. This user experience design can be applied across all channels, such as a call center or physical location.

Have you seen style tiles, element collages, or pattern libraries? These are just a few examples of how designers are reacting to the explosion of devices and interface sizes. After all, thinking about the parts of a “page”—not just the sum of those parts—helps us create smart, scalable, maintainable designs for all those newfangled technologies.

The so called Digital Divide is increasingly being filled with mobile devices. Because of that, you need an understanding of how your designs are appearing and behaving on smaller screens. Cyd Harrell is an expert on user research, and the one we to turn for mobile research. She says that it’s not just how your designs display on these devices but also the behavior of your users as they interact on these more personal gadgets. Users consider their mobile phones to be a much more private device than a desktop computer.

What’s going to make your whole company focus on mobile? How do people interact with their mobiles device? How can you design for this new reality and even create experiences that translate from mobile to laptop to TV?

Why don’t design students coming out of school know about responsive design or creating mobile apps? Why are our self-taught hackers and C.S. grads having a tough time keeping up with the pace of technology innovation? It’s not that schools or professional development programs are slow to adapt; it’s more complicated than that. But our tendency to focus on skills alone just isn’t sustainable. Instead, we need to start investing in the ways we create designers and fuel their growth.

Mobile phones are like research platforms in our pockets. With the right strategy, we can quickly understand our users’ behavior, wherever they are. And given the ubiquity of mobile usage — even among hard-to-reach populations — we as UX designers are especially poised to make our lives easier while designing better products. That is, if we actually do the research. Fortunately, Cyd Harrell knows how to gather data without breaking budgets or extending timelines.

By now, companies know they need to be “on mobile.” But should that experience be a native app, a mobile web app, or something in between? The answer rarely is such a simple choice. And if you’ve ever entered into mobile discussions with a series of stakeholders, it may seem impossible to reach consensus.

Many teams follow a linear design process with a big reveal—ta-da!—once the aesthetics, layout, and flow are “ready” for client feedback. Weeks later, the front-end developer enters to turn an approved design into a responsive site that functions perfectly across devices. Now imagine showing clients your work in Week 1. How would everyone respond to unpolished designs?

Integrating UX into an Agile workflow has historically been a bit of a challenge. This could be due to a general lack of communication with the development team, or not feeling like the proper time or value is given to UX within the organization. Through her research, Aviva Rosenstein discovered that many problems people were having are commonplace. Additionally, she found that others had actually already worked out solutions to some of these.