Category: UX

The best European design events and conferences in 2017

September 2017 Reasons to: Design, Code & Create Design, Code, Create & Come Together Reasons to: is the award winning 3 day international conference with a festival vibe, held annually in Brighton UK, every first Mon, Tue, Weds of every September. Each year the very best international creative and developer speakers take to the stage to… Continue reading The best European design events and conferences in 2017

Dynamic Icons in Sketch

Two years ago, I had a grand total of zero minutes played in Sketch. Today — let’s do the math — I have approximately 18 months in Sketch x 172 working hours per month, equalling 3,132 hours. In that time I’ve discovered the best solution for tedious icon creation problems that zap your time. In the past, designers spent… Continue reading Dynamic Icons in Sketch

Taking responsibility for the things you launch

Let’s travel back in time. I’ll promise we’ll get back here in just a moment. A few months ago I launched Mindful, an extension for Google Chrome that aims at making users more mindful about their thoughts, ideas, and ongoing tasks by showing their notes in every new tab. Mindful is powered by a text… Continue reading Taking responsibility for the things you launch

Inspiring UX quotes, mobile navigation patterns, taxonomies and more UX this week

What’s hot in UX this week: Design better data tables → Data is useless without the ability to visualize and act on it. The success of future industries will couple advanced data collection with a better user experience, and the data table comprises much of this user experience. Good data tables allow users to scan, analyze,… Continue reading Inspiring UX quotes, mobile navigation patterns, taxonomies and more UX this week

Inspiring quotes in UX to give you the hope you’ve been looking for

On our process “Does it better” will always beat “did it first.” – Aaron Levie “Photoshop is the most effective way to show your clients what their website will never look like.” – Stephen Hay “If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings.” – Tom & David Kelley “If you think good design is… Continue reading Inspiring quotes in UX to give you the hope you’ve been looking for

Walking Through Design in Tokyo

People push past me as I exit the train at Shibuya station, and I start looking for the Hachiko statue. My friends told me to meet there before dinner, but ten minutes later I’m still lost. Thankfully once I slow down and look at my surroundings, I see guides all around me. At its size… Continue reading Walking Through Design in Tokyo

The Evolution Process From A Junior Level Designer To Becoming A Design Lead

This post feels somewhat like a coming of age story. If you’re a junior designer, it might be eye opening. On the contrary, as a design lead it might be the dark satirical humor after a long day that puts a smile on your face. As designers, we all face daily battles big or small,… Continue reading The Evolution Process From A Junior Level Designer To Becoming A Design Lead

It’s not you, it’s your form

#4 Give certainty When designing a form, we should present users with all the information they need so they can navigate the form easily. Don’t keep them guessing or be ambiguous. The achievement of the goal should be clear and leave the user with the feeling that the task is (really) done. When examining the previous… Continue reading It’s not you, it’s your form

The New Skeuomorphism is in Your Voice Assistant

Google Home and Amazon Echo Yay, we killed Skeuomorphism! Not too long ago humanity left behind its skeuomorphic interfaces. Skeuomorphism meant using references to real world surface textures on visual interfaces to enhance their comprehensibility. We stripped our visual interfaces off their ornamentations to allow a more authentic approach to visual aesthetics. Killing skeuomorphism made us… Continue reading The New Skeuomorphism is in Your Voice Assistant

A Beginners Guide To Making Yourself Artificially Intelligent • (It’s A Lot Easier Than You Think)

If you are helping somebody, you are awaking somebody. A High-Level Overview Of The Design This is an awesome chance to begin to think about what you wear everyday. Sitting down, and analyzing what you like to wear allows you to refractor your personal source code that is written via the Python Script inside you. Let’s… Continue reading A Beginners Guide To Making Yourself Artificially Intelligent • (It’s A Lot Easier Than You Think)

Women in Tech, the power of storytelling, anticipatory design and other UX links this week

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

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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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