Nurturing diversity at work and in your work → Homogeneity is not normal. But we’ve been conditioned toward homogeneity and non-diversity over the decades by media, exacerbated in 2016 with Fox News crowned the most watched cable network and their all-white men prime time line-up. By pop culture and its lack of diversity in TV, movies,… Continue reading Women in Tech, the power of storytelling, anticipatory design and other UX links this week
Category: UX
Nurturing diversity at work and in your work
in·ten·tion·al·i·ty: the fact of being deliberate or purposive; the quality of mental states (e.g., thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes) that consists in their being directed toward some object or state of affairs. Please. It’s 2017 and we still have this: (It’s a big ol’ gap between men’s earnings and women’s earnings across all occupations.) And this: (It’s… Continue reading Nurturing diversity at work and in your work
Resist — or reach out? Thoughts on entrepreneurship and diversity
re·sist·ance: the refusal to accept or comply with something; the attempt to prevent something by action or argument; the ability not to be affected by something adversely. #Grabyourwallet, weekly marches, Facebook and Twitter posts galore — our anger won’t subside any time soon, and for good reason. Its expression is powerful and meaningful. But how does Melissa,… Continue reading Resist — or reach out? Thoughts on entrepreneurship and diversity
Designing Accessible Products
2. Focus Focus is one of the most important accessibility features that enables users to use a computer with only a keyboard without the need for a mouse. Most reset stylesheets have this one line of code that causes major accessibility failure – :focus {outline: 0;} This is an anti-pattern that needs to be avoided… Continue reading Designing Accessible Products
Combatting unconscious bias in design
bi·as: prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair; cause to feel or show inclination or prejudice for or against someone or something. A few years ago, a male-led design team was working on a brief for a major athletic apparel… Continue reading Combatting unconscious bias in design
The FAQs that got me more UX interviews (and ultimately my dream job)
At the top of my FAQs I added links to my email, portfolio, Medium, and LinkedIn for convenience. What does design mean to you? Design is strategic problem solving that improves people’s lives. Empathy, pragmatism and creativity are applied to the adventure of hunting and validating ideas — a process that leads to intentional solutions. The results are… Continue reading The FAQs that got me more UX interviews (and ultimately my dream job)
Getting traction for experience design
Back in the eighties the job of design was to make things work reasonably. Technologies were in such a struggle to stay stable that any extra quality seemed unnecessary. In those times your computer would crash five times a day. So, worrying about beauty or engagement seemed like a somewhat unnecessary luxury. Fast-forwarding to 2007.… Continue reading Getting traction for experience design
Design is Diversity, UX Job Boards, Terrible Designs, and other UX links this week
What’s hot in UX this week: Design is Diversity: it’s Time to Talk about our Role as Designers → As designers, we spend most of our day imagining and building experiences that, when added up, take a big portion of people’s days and affect a lot the relationships they have with other people and with… Continue reading Design is Diversity, UX Job Boards, Terrible Designs, and other UX links this week
An engineering manager’s guide to rebranding —
Anytime a company launches a rebrand there’s the obligatory “how we did it” blog post. Uber did it, AirBnB did it and we did it. Usually these posts jump right from “good looking people putting post-it notes on a glass wall” to “unveil on an unsuspecting public” stage, and completely skip the really tricky part — going… Continue reading An engineering manager’s guide to rebranding
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UX Job Boards: 24 places to find a job in User Experience Design
[unable to retrieve full-text content] A lot of people ask about reliable sources to find UX and UI jobs online. The challenge is: job postings in our industry are very fragmented. Here are a few places for you to start your search. Photo: Raw Pixel Professional Job Boards UXPA Job Bank Job Bank | User Experience Professionals Association IxDA… Continue reading UX Job Boards: 24 places to find a job in User Experience Design
Designing Charts — Principles Every Designer Should Know
Use real data in your chart mock ups Designers have a tendency to create the most beautiful version of a chart possible without any regard to the real data that it needs to handle when it’s actually implemented. This can cause endless headaches for the developers trying to build this thing you designed, and even more… Continue reading Designing Charts — Principles Every Designer Should Know
More Gold for Emerging Interface Designers
Text in this VR GUI. http://www.mastersofpie.com/project/siemens-oculus-rift-tradeshow-experience/ Use Your Words The written word makes up a significant portion of how we build our interfaces. Even the best GUIs use text. What happens when you don’t consider the language used in your interface? It fails. It breaks the user’s trust and in the end, costs money when visitors… Continue reading More Gold for Emerging Interface Designers
Connections and creativity.
In 1978, scientist and historian James Burke produced a ten part documentary called ‘Connections’. In this documentary series he traced back a (then) modern invention through the history of connected ideas that led to it. Across the ten episodes the viewer goes on many weird and wonderful journeys learning such things as: how the concept… Continue reading Connections and creativity.
Driving innovation [1/2]: a portfolio perspective
In every sector, it’s possible to notice growing efforts towards innovation. More and more organizations do not take their market and own relevance for granted, and realize that some [widely applied] strategies to maintain and grow their businesses [like plain price competition, and aggressive portfolio expansion, among others] may incubate serious near and long term… Continue reading Driving innovation [1/2]: a portfolio perspective
Women in UX, YouTube channels for designers, Bots from Hell, and more UX this week
What’s hot in UX this week: 30 Women Rocking in UX to Celebrate the International Women’s Day → Last Wednesday was International Women’s Day. According to Wikipedia, in different regions the focus of the celebrations ranges from general celebration of respect, appreciation and love towards women for their economic, political and social achievements. That’s what we’re… Continue reading Women in UX, YouTube channels for designers, Bots from Hell, and more UX this week
How UberEats could make ordering for groups of friends simpler — a UX case study
The Problem — I find myself using UberEats (launched early last year) more frequently than the likes of DoorDash primarily because of two reasons: Continuous promotions — They have had some really cool promotions all this while. (No delivery cost upto $5 for an order) Ordering experience — From searching for food to ordering and waiting for it, the… Continue reading How UberEats could make ordering for groups of friends simpler — a UX case study
The best YouTube channels for designers and developers
I just recently realized how much time I spend on YouTube everyday. To be more precise, about 50 minutes every single day. About three years ago I started developing the habit of opening the YouTube Subscriptions page every day to check out new videos from the channels I had subscribed to. More recently, I decided… Continue reading The best YouTube channels for designers and developers
As a Designer I want better Release Notes
The perfect release note ???????? Finally what you’ve being waiting for. How you piece all this together, and it’s broken down for you in nothing more than plain text: The introduction. A short paragraph. Make this personal if appropriate. Eg. “Season greetings, everyone! You asked, Santa listened – this update is exactly what you ask for… Continue reading As a Designer I want better Release Notes
Overcoming Material Design.
Okay, I’m going to start this off with one statement; Material Design is great. It has helped unify user interfaces across platforms, and it provides designers with awesome resources (the icons especially ????????). And while some of you may use aterial Design as your UI-North-Star (why are you doing that to yourself), I am not… Continue reading Overcoming Material Design.
Form is Functional: Why Design is More Than Gold Plating
When budgets are tight in the software world and companies want to save money, form is usually the first to go. In these situations, the design tends to be considered ‘gold plating’ and not a necessity. It’s thought to only make the product ‘look nice’. This assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. Form has… Continue reading Form is Functional: Why Design is More Than Gold Plating
A letter from Sol LeWitt about creative block, read by Benedict Cumberbatch
In 1960, pioneering American artists Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse met for the first time and instantly clicked, quickly forming a strong, deep bond that would last for ten years and result in countless inspirational discussions and rich exchanges of ideas. In the video below, Benedict Cumberbatch reads a letter sent from Sol to Eva… Continue reading A letter from Sol LeWitt about creative block, read by Benedict Cumberbatch
Interaction Awards, Chatbot Interactions, Empathy as Faux Ethics, and more UX this week
What’s hot in UX this week: Notifications: an Interview with John Saito, from Dropbox → We dream of a future with connected and ubiquitous experiences, but we still feel overwhelmed with the notifications across all our devices. In this last piece of our series we interviewed John Saito, ‘designer of words’ at Dropbox, about how we… Continue reading Interaction Awards, Chatbot Interactions, Empathy as Faux Ethics, and more UX this week
Why human-centered design is an expectation.
Human-Centered Design, in short, is the practice of a management and problem solving process that places people (your customer) at the center of every decision. It requires curiosity and contextual observation, empathy, ideation, iteration, and implementation. “Human-centered” is the core of user, customer, and service experience design (UX, CX, SX). Almost every company has a… Continue reading Why human-centered design is an expectation.
Digital suffocation.
It’s dawned on me how incessant and intrusive phone notifications are. I may be realising this late. About two months ago I installed an app called 360 Security on my Android phone. One of the many functions it had was a ‘Notification Manager’. I switched it on and let it do it’s thing. A week… Continue reading Digital suffocation.