The best Slack groups for UX designers

Tons of companies are using Slack to organize and facilitate how their employees communicate on a daily basis. Slack has now more than 5 million daily active users and more than 60,000 teams around the world. But whether the company you work for use Slack or not, you can still use the tool to connect… Continue reading The best Slack groups for UX designers

Creating a first Product Design System in Sketch

The first days I remember the first day I joined Agorize, I asked the PM if there is a styleguide I can use in Sketch. He told me we didn’t have any styleguide and only had some screens designed in Photoshop. The problem is that we have a product with a consumer-facing side and a client-facing… Continue reading Creating a first Product Design System in Sketch

Essential Ingredients For Every Competitive Analysis

The Whys Why are competitors doing things a certain way? Why do people trust or use a competitor’s product? Why is a particular product among the top 3 or top 5 solutions in the market? One of the most effective practice is to use the 5 Whys technique. You can read more about it here.… Continue reading Essential Ingredients For Every Competitive Analysis

The 5 questions you should be asking yourself all day, everyday #UX

The other day I found myself writing down a list of 5 questions I was asking myself more frequently than ever in the projects I am working on — and decided to pass it on to my team as well. The agency life is extremely fast-paced. Each Experience Designer on my team is simultaneously involved in two… Continue reading The 5 questions you should be asking yourself all day, everyday #UX

Marketing and UX, perfect error messages, prototyping with Lottie and Principle and more UX links

Ending a client meeting at the perfect time, according to Paula Scher → You are giving a presentation. This line is the line of the reasonable level of expectation that everyone has when you walk into the room. You begin to present, and you come above the reasonable level of expectation; everybody gets enthusiastic, people begin… Continue reading Marketing and UX, perfect error messages, prototyping with Lottie and Principle and more UX links

No Digital Tools needed: Creating Digital Products

Photo by Climate KIC on Unsplash I am sure, every UI and UX Designer knows that kind of problem: You have received a briefing for a new project. Everybody is on fire and is going to do some fancy stuff for it. But how to start? How to create innovative ideas? How to set your mind… Continue reading No Digital Tools needed: Creating Digital Products

Copy narcissism, design for startups, Sephora’s UX and other links this week

If you like the links, don’t forget to ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????? When copy loves itself too much → One time, I nearly lost my mind while brainstorming copy for a holiday print ad. I was writing for Havenly, an interior design company, and we were advertising in a popular home decorating magazine. “Keep it simple,” I told myself,… Continue reading Copy narcissism, design for startups, Sephora’s UX and other links this week

When Copy Loves Itself Too Much

One time, I nearly lost my mind while brainstorming copy for a holiday print ad. I was writing for Havenly, an interior design company, and we were advertising in a popular home decorating magazine. “Keep it simple,” I told myself, “this has been done hundreds of times before.” An ad that took way too long… Continue reading When Copy Loves Itself Too Much

Airbnb First Date Concept

Iterations After synthesizing the insights, I re-iterated on the concepts to alleviate the weaknesses and further highlight the strengths. Idea 1: Bingo x Digital Gift Combining Bingo and Digital Gift Exchange Concepts Medium Fidelity Wireframes of Situations Where Their Interests Matched and Don’t After testing, I decided to remove the gamified portion of the concept and replaced it… Continue reading Airbnb First Date Concept

Monitoring the user's brain for usability testing

I have a habit of connecting the dots between design and various other fields of studies which I start learning about. Lately, I have been learning neurosciences and thinking about how we could harness findings from it to designing better products. It gave me chills. For instance, introduction of brain activity monitoring device such as… Continue reading Monitoring the user's brain for usability testing

On Being Humble, Creative, and Independent

On Being Humble Be modest. Your accomplishments to date have brought you this far, but don’t depend on it to bring you any further. That design competition you won, painting sold to a museum exhibition, or local media sensation? Cheers to having your hard work rewarded. Keep it up. Your accomplishments in the future starts with… Continue reading On Being Humble, Creative, and Independent

Improving Couple of Experiences in Strava (Unsolicited)

Recording an activity Current design analysis The app comprises of four tabs: Feed (default selection), Explore, Record, Profile and More. Although the Feed is the default selection, most of the times, as soon as I open the app, all I want is to start recording the activity, i.e, running or cycling. However, in the current setup, I… Continue reading Improving Couple of Experiences in Strava (Unsolicited)

Museums, show your collection some love

Part I If you’ve ever visited a museum website, the above navigation structure probably looks familiar to you. Sections for “visit,” “exhibitions,” and “collection” are the core navigational components for the vast majority of museum websites. There’s an essential distinction that museums make between the permanent collection (those objects owned by the institution) and exhibitions… Continue reading Museums, show your collection some love

UX overload, toolkit of a product designer, testing words, and more UX this week

If you like the links, don’t forget to ???? ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????. You don’t need to know everything about UX → I find myself saying this to other people quite often. You don’t need to be a specialist in all possible verticals within User Experience Design. And you probably can’t. A lot of people are starting in UX… Continue reading UX overload, toolkit of a product designer, testing words, and more UX this week

You don’t need to know everything about UX

“You don’t need to know everything about UX”. I find myself saying this to other people quite often. You don’t need to be a specialist in all possible verticals within User Experience Design. And you probably can’t. A lot of people are starting in UX just now. The high level of attention our discipline has… Continue reading You don’t need to know everything about UX

Public speaking, embracing the idle mind, principles of data viz, and more UX links this week

If you like the links, don’t forget to ???? ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????. Best practices for public speaking in design conferences and events → We all reach a point in our careers when we start speaking in public. Designers, in particular, are pretty good at organizing conferences, panels, meetups, livestreams and other forms of publicly sharing knowledge with fellow… Continue reading Public speaking, embracing the idle mind, principles of data viz, and more UX links this week

Best practices for public speaking in design conferences and events

Hello, old friend. We all reach a point in our careers when we start speaking in public. Designers, in particular, are pretty good at organizing conferences, panels, meetups, livestreams and other forms of publicly sharing knowledge with fellow designers. Speaking at design events is not only important for the design community as a whole, but also… Continue reading Best practices for public speaking in design conferences and events

Design makes AI smarter

Designers today most likely have been designing for products that use some level of AI for automation. We have been designing in the first stage of AI, artificial narrow intelligence. To get to the second stage of AI, artificial general intelligence, we need user data. Lots of it. How do we get this information? To… Continue reading Design makes AI smarter

Sketch Gists — Useful snippets for plugin development

Last week I was developing an internal tool to create a design workflow for my workplace. The process involved creating a style guide for a new project by setting up the branding colours, typefaces, shadows and scrim. All went well until it was required to convert the text layers into symbols so as to generalise… Continue reading Sketch Gists — Useful snippets for plugin development

UX brutalism, fragile ideas, Kano model and more UX links this week

What’s hot in UX this week: Brutalist wireframes → Usability? Legibility? Common sense? Forget everything you know about UX. Here is a proper framework for designing brutalist experiences that your design peers will love. The Brutalist UX Framework™ is a not a tool nor a template; it is a mindset for UX Designers that brings… Continue reading UX brutalism, fragile ideas, Kano model and more UX links this week

Hey Designer, why so fragile?

The Why Praise overdose If you visit the comment section of behance.com and you manage to see through all the self-promotion, you’ll find that the comments are unusually polite and positive. Every project seems to have really positive feedback, the only thing that really distinguishes projects is the amount of praise they get. The reason… Continue reading Hey Designer, why so fragile?

UX & Psychology go hand in hand— How Gestalt theory appears in UX design?

Source: iStock In the age of AI and “Human Centered Machine Learning”, it’s essential that we understand the needs and behaviour of our users. This is doubly true as a UX designer. In order to create work that better serves the needs of our users, it’s important to understand some basic psychological principles. Which is… Continue reading UX & Psychology go hand in hand— How Gestalt theory appears in UX design?

Diversity is Punk Rock

I used to think “diversity” meant the need for the representation of a particular set of perspectives or cultures, i.e., “there are lot of men in this room, therefore we need women.” This idea prevented me from participating in the discourse in the past because I’ve never felt like I identify with any single community.… Continue reading Diversity is Punk Rock