How to Plan Your First Successful Website

Development By Simon Sterne 3 days ago Planning a new website can be exciting and — if you’re anything like me — a little daunting. Whether you’re an experienced freelancer, a team of hardened developers, or a small business owner, a well-structured plan is critical for success. In this post, I’ll give you the benefit… Continue reading How to Plan Your First Successful Website

90% of designers are unhirable?

Or why your cookie-cutter portfolio doesn’t cut it and how to fix it Image by Matej Latin (Author) Here’s the harsh truth: I’ve reviewed more than 1,000 portfolios in my design career so far, and I turned 90% of them down because of one thing — the linear design process. By “linear design process” I mean cookie-cutter case studies that… Continue reading 90% of designers are unhirable?

Designing genAI-enhanced features

Elevating user experience through intelligent content enhancement and personalization. Futuristic workspace (Created with Dall-E) Chatbots serve as an accessible gateway to the realm of Generative AI features, a fact underscored by the success of ChatGPT. Their simplicity, requiring only basic instructions to engage in natural dialogues, allows them to integrate across various digital platforms seamlessly. Yet,… Continue reading Designing genAI-enhanced features

Name/Role/Value – Whose Role Is It Anyway?

Welcome to the next edition of my Design Strategy blog series. Today, I’m sharing a client story with the hope that y’all will focus on thinking about WHY you should do things differently so that your program can rapidly mature and scale quickly. I will once again skip the “how-to” article formula and dry laundry… Continue reading Name/Role/Value – Whose Role Is It Anyway?

Designing safe and trustworthy AI systems

Designing for safe and trustworthy AI Why human oversight to make up for AI errors doesn’t work and what we can do instead Illustration created by Cara Storath in Midjourney As much as AI is powerful, in some cases it can be misleading or wrong. A realization that came too late to a New York lawyer,… Continue reading Designing safe and trustworthy AI systems

Risk tolerance: why some countries prefer more complex UIs

An analysis of Uncertainty Avoidance and Amazon’s website in various countries Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash What do Switzerland, the US, Sweden, the UK, and the Netherlands have in common? They are all rich, protestant, relatively cold countries where a big part of the population consists of (former) immigrants. They also form the top 5 of… Continue reading Risk tolerance: why some countries prefer more complex UIs

How to AI

Three approaches to deploying generative AI for brands and corporations. 11 out 12 are generated by AI. One is real. Which one? | Source: Imagenavi & Jimmy Fermin History rhymes This isn’t a trick question: 11 out of 12 in the image above are generated by AI. Which one is the real person? I posed this quiz… Continue reading How to AI

Design for meaningful outcomes

Aim for quality outcomes, not just outputs — that’s how we can drive customer and business value! Designing for outcomes enables us to focus on customer needs and meaningful business results. “Start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology,” Steve Jobs once said. To write a compelling story, start with the ending as a meaningful destination.… Continue reading Design for meaningful outcomes

Unveiling the experience wheel of true fortune

Our tendency to focus on negative experiences has prevented us from recognizing and seizing the opportunities of another loop. This is better known as the flywheel effect, and the key ingredient is how success can be replicated through a series of logical but effective steps until it links as a chain. (Image source: Neil Webb) Would… Continue reading Unveiling the experience wheel of true fortune

11 Free Website Builders to Try in 2023

Before we go any further, let’s get the whole ​‘all you need to make a website is a basic text editor and a browser’ thing out of the way before we start: Yes, it’s true, you can make a fully functioning, good-looking website with NotePad or TextEdit, but you also need a not inconsiderable level of knowledge and skill. And even… Continue reading 11 Free Website Builders to Try in 2023

Think Inside the Box: How Accessibility Shapes Digital Product Design

Think inside the box: How accessibility shapes digital product design How constraints ignite creativity, spark innovation, and why accessibility is a uniquely effective constraint everyone should embrace. “Design depends largely on constraints.” — Charles Eames Access to digital technologies is a fundamental human right¹ and legal obligation². In an ideal world, there would be no need for more justification to… Continue reading Think Inside the Box: How Accessibility Shapes Digital Product Design

Designing for AI: beyond the chatbot

Guidelines and strategies for meaningfully leveraging AI in your applications With the recent advancements in AI, we as designers, builders, and creators, face big questions about the future of applications and how people will interact with digital experiences. Generative AI has unleashed huge possibilities with what we can do with AI. People are now using… Continue reading Designing for AI: beyond the chatbot

How to Optimize UX Design for Screen Readers

Achieving digital accessibility and optimizing your platform for screen readers, can be a strategic decision with multifaceted benefits. Not only does it reflect empathy and inclusivity for visually impaired users, but it also potentially expands your audience and the reach of your message. Let’s delve into the importance of UX design for screen readers, practical… Continue reading How to Optimize UX Design for Screen Readers

Finding value at the bookends

Improving the design of solutions by conducting foundational pre-design research and post-launch analyses. The UX research field is experiencing a significant transformation as it becomes increasingly prevalent and expands beyond dedicated user researchers. Both user researchers and “people who do research” are engaging in more user interviews, surveys, and other forms of data collection, recognizing… Continue reading Finding value at the bookends

Facilitating effective ideation meetings

[unable to retrieve full-text content] Designing engaging and productive gatherings Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash In today’s hybrid work landscape, meetings have become abundant, but unfortunately, many of them still suffer from inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Specifically, meetings aimed at generating ideas to address various challenges related to people, processes, or products encounter recurring issues. The lack… Continue reading Facilitating effective ideation meetings

AI is about to kill creativity

AI has a massive disruptive quality on the creative sector. Is AI going to benefit us, or will it create a new dark age for innovation? The Aeolipile (left) and the Steam engine (right) on a section of Bosch’s masterpiece The Last Judgment (Wikimedia) In the early first century, the first steam engine was invented… Continue reading AI is about to kill creativity

How to design generative AI experiences to be truly helpful

From bullsh*t generator to ultimate copilot. Photo by Rolf van Root on Unsplash Suddenly, news about Generative AI is everywhere. People talk about how ChatGPT reached 1 million users in a record of 5 days, how Goldman Sachs predicts that AI will impact 300 million jobs, and how the new Bing goes “unhinged”… All the hypes aside,… Continue reading How to design generative AI experiences to be truly helpful

Patterns are good

Why should you care about them? Apple Magic Mouse Versus Logitech MX Master. Source: Tidbits A design pattern is a document that describes a common solution to a recurring design problem. According to Tibor Kunert (2009), using design patterns allows designers to quickly find solutions to problems using proven designs, rather than starting from scratch each time.… Continue reading Patterns are good

Character creation UX

A guide to CCIs in game design. Walking dressed cyberpunk in a cyberpunk city by Paola Ascanio via MidJourney Character creation is an essential aspect of most video games, allowing players to customize their avatars and immerse themselves in the game world. As a user experience (UX) designer, your role in game design is to create… Continue reading Character creation UX

The way you make me feel — how to set up in-app feedback

The way you make me feel — how to set up in-app feedback The success and longevity of an application depend on positive user acceptance. In order to integrate the users’ problems, needs, and expectations, it is necessary to continuously collect and analyze their feedback. From the various possible feedback channels, I have mapped the best practices for… Continue reading The way you make me feel — how to set up in-app feedback

How to Use Block Template Parts in a Classic WordPress Theme

Sometimes, it’s the unexpected features that make WordPress so powerful. Those little things that you didn’t know you need can end up having a big impact. WordPress 6.1 has brought about one of these hidden gems: the ability to use block template parts within a classic theme. It takes the capabilities of block themes and… Continue reading How to Use Block Template Parts in a Classic WordPress Theme

Building inclusive products for trans people

Answering trans people’s needs online can create a safer digital environment and lead to a more diverse workforce in Tech. Breaking news: design can help do it. This article is issued from “The great absentee: the trans community in our digital products” conference, held in French by Christopher De Paola and me at “Paris Web 2022”… Continue reading Building inclusive products for trans people

What did Victor Papanek leave for UX designers in “Design for Real Word”?

In the “Back to basics” series, I would like to rediscover the content of the textbooks I read at the beginning of my industrial design studies. I am a supporter of wise (prudent) use of the achievements of the predecessors, which is why I re-read these valuable, twentieth-century books on design and try to extract… Continue reading What did Victor Papanek leave for UX designers in “Design for Real Word”?

4g CO2 per email—really?

Disentangling a well-known “fact” about emails. There’s a lot of “received wisdom” kicking about on the internet — ideas and “facts” which are essentially presented without question on the basis of “ he said it, so it must be true”. This afflicts many fields, and sustainability is no exception. One common example is that “sending an email generates… Continue reading 4g CO2 per email—really?