Conway's Law explained - Required knowledge for designers
Explore how the structure of your organization directly influences your digital products as we delve into Conway's Law from the sunny backdrop of Palm Springs. Learn how balanced, diverse teams and user-centered design approaches can lead to digital products that resonate with a wide audience.
Why do we have balanced product teams?
Dive into the fundamental role of balanced product teams in problem-solving and product development, illustrated through real experiences at Pivotal Labs and Strava. Discover the dynamics of 'two pizza teams' and see why a mix of product management, design, data science, and engineering talent can ensure all voices are heard and lead to superior products and features.
Design feedback anti-patterns and how to defeat them
In this article, learn how to give effective design feedback that is constructive, actionable, and kind. The article identifies common bad patterns in design feedback, including unclear objectives, lack of goals, absence of vulnerability and safety, unproductive feedback, and more. It also provides tips for building a story that is concise, accessible, and informative, and how to review design work effectively. As a designer, you can teach others how to read screens and offer feedback constructively, making the feedback process more valuable and meaningful for all.
How to give feedback on a design you know nothing about
In this article, I cover the risks of product designers critiquing shipped work without considering the context in which the product was developed. They argue that such analysis can be naive and arrogant, and offer tips for designers to engage with products in a more mature and thoughtful way.
Lo-fi design is beautiful.
Are you a perfectionist when it comes to product design? In a world where technology changes rapidly, the pressure to deliver a perfectly polished product can be overwhelming. But what if we took a cue from lo-fi music and embraced the beauty of imperfection? In this article, we explore the benefits of putting out "naked" ideas and being okay with their rawness. Learn why you don't always have to aim for perfection and how it can actually hold you back from discovering great ideas.
The Agony and Ecstacy of Pair Design
Discover the benefits and challenges of design pairing in this insightful article. Learn how this experimental approach can help designers gain unprecedented insights into their process and themselves, and why it's important to use it properly. Explore the various ways pairing can improve the design process, from mentoring to skill transference, and how it can enhance user testing and synthesis.
It’s simple, you’re killing the onboarding experience.
Onboarding cards in apps are a pervasive cliché and are often dropped into app designs without much user-centered thinking. In this article I suggest that onboarding that relies on text and images are not going to be inclusive or relatable to the variety of cognitive and physical attributes people have, thus designers should consider designing a beautiful and useful onboarding experience based on user research, including addressing what users need to do first, and creating an immersive experience.
Fast Forward Design: MVP’s with the 90/10 rule
Discover the benefits of using UI patterns in your design process and how it can lead to faster, more efficient product development. In this article, we explore the 90/10 rule and why designers should focus on custom aspects of their designs only after leveraging existing patterns. Learn how this approach can help you shift your focus to user research, empower developers, and ultimately create a better user experience for your product.
The UX of Design Files
This article explores a serialization technique for organizing Sketch and Figma artboards to improve team experience by lowering the friction of understanding how you organize your design files.
Engaging multiple stakeholders with the dots and cards design critique
The dots and cards design critique is a meeting format that enables designers to engage multiple stakeholders in a project, particularly those who may have trouble agreeing with each other because they rarely meet together. Using dot stickers, index cards, sharpie markers, and printed designs, the stakeholders silently review the designs and provide feedback by putting dots on the areas they have questions or comments on and writing their thoughts on index cards. The format offers benefits, such as encouraging active participation, hot spotting problem areas, and engaging different learning styles, resulting in stakeholders taking ownership over the outcome of their feedback.