4 Invisible User Experiences you Never Knew About
It's when they DON'T say anything that you know you've done a good job.
When designing the experience and interactions of a product, the most common question I ask myself is, “What is the least amount of work a user has to do, to achieve their desired outcome?”
The User Experience of Creative Sprints
A how-to to get an entire team involved in coming up with ideas.
Spatial Interfaces
Great article on how to take into account spatial reasoning in your designs.
How The Next Web Redesign Puts Content First
A case study of The Next Web's redesign process - there are some interesting ideas explored here in how to focus on their content.
The Rise of Design Machines and why everything looks the same.
In our digital world, too many teams assign the responsibilities of things like wireframing, prototyping, user flows, research, testing, and content strategy under the umbrella of UX design. Then we push the responsibilities of typography, colour, form, illustration, photography, and visual details to a separate visual or UI designer… as if those factors don’t affect the visitor’s experience. But this line is arbitrary and has led us to divorce expression from interactivity and layout. Choosing readable or expressive typefaces and proper use of white space is just as important as user flow. In fact, it’s a vital part of it.
I love being involved with all of the above... it keeps me sane about the bigger picture and helps me from getting too lost in details.
(I also just seriously love the design of the Louder Than Ten site.)
Wasted Time
Don't be taken in by the sunk-cost fallacy...
Continuing to work on the wrong solution just because we’ve spent so much time on it is an example of a sunk cost fallacy, the phenomenon where we justify increasing investment in a decision despite evidence suggesting that the benefits aren’t worth continuing. Letting go of a commitment we’ve already made is extremely hard, even when it’s what we have to do.
In Defense of CSS
CSS is a design tool, like anything else, and you are making design decisions with every line of CSS you write.
Get Hired
How Happy Cog evaluates their design candidates - I always find it so helpful when companies share their internal processes like hiring.
What are some UX "sins" commonly made by beginner designers that should be avoided?
For me, #1 would be not taking the time to understand the root problem... what you end up creating then is just a solution in search of problem.
Whenever I try to improve, I do good for a couple of days but I lose interest eventually. How can I really improve?
Insightful response to this questions.... How can you discover the underlying reason to why you do what you do?
...when we’re stuck, we need to look outside of design, not just at other design. We need to draw inspiration more and more from other outlets that allow us to make and that allow us to get unstuck. We can learn something new, see something different, and make something interesting that way.
Yes yes yes I relate so hard to this article... I sometimes catch myself feeling guilty for spending time with other interests, like the copious amounts of reading I do, when maybe I should be spending that time getting better at design. When I catch myself doing that I have to take a step back and realize that I am improving my design skills by going outside my usual spaces, following other interests, and drawing inspiration from them.
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