Design - iDevie

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

How to Gain Insights from Emotionally Charged Questions

http://www.gratisography.com In product design, we are taught that we shouldn’t ask leading questions in interviews / testing. Don’t you hate when XXX happens?Isn’t it harder that you don’t have XXX in your life?Wouldn’t your life be simpler if you had XXX product? We avoid asking leading questions like those. But why? Generally it is true… Continue reading How to Gain Insights from Emotionally Charged Questions

Make War, Not Interfaces

A Product Designer riding into battle — Andrew Yardley Product Design is a lot like warfare. Think about it. Users are the enemy. Like Clone Troopers straight out of Episode II, they are legion. Their numbers are seemingly without end. Without fail and without relent they will come at you, poking holes in your design, finding its fatal… Continue reading Make War, Not Interfaces

Solving the right problem, VR needs UX, github for designers, and more UX this week

A year ago… A psychological approach to designing interfaces → Do you ever get that feeling when you’re in a supermarket, looking at a sea of different types of toothpaste and you have no idea what to get? The reason why you get overwhelmed by these excessive options has to do with, you guessed it, psychology.… Continue reading Solving the right problem, VR needs UX, github for designers, and more UX this week

11 Communication Techniques for Designers

You have spent years getting this far — going to university, taking regular courses and workshops, going to conferences, reading countless books, articles, and listening to weekly podcasts — only for a stakeholder to steamroll your design expertise.Here are 11 techniques for improving your communication skills and getting your designs approved. There comes a point in every designers career… Continue reading 11 Communication Techniques for Designers

The Core Elements of Product Design: Strategy, Pillars and Principles

Establish these core elements up front to clarify your best product solution You can quote my partner-in-[design]crime and I on that. I’ve dedicated most of my career to digital design within the walls of big business. The endless uphill battle never ceases to remind me that traditional business models have yet to fully adopt design into… Continue reading The Core Elements of Product Design: Strategy, Pillars and Principles

Atomic design: how to design systems of components

Today, the idea of Atomic Design is to begin with common raw material (atoms) with which we can build the rest of the project: Today: we start from atoms and we build the rest from there We have thus not only an “air de famille” between all the screens, but also a system which offers infinite… Continue reading Atomic design: how to design systems of components

From Human-centered design to design for enhancing human ability

The role of design is consequently evolving. From initially being a domain of communication with a predominant aesthetic focus design has taken a key role in the creation of products and has become a human advocacy. Design has moved into the C-Suite with the appointment of Chief Design Officers (CDO) while Design Thinking shifted the… Continue reading From Human-centered design to design for enhancing human ability