You can find techniques for UX strategy in Measure UX 🧭 — with live UX training later this year. Jump to table of contents.
We see many debates about designers being replaced by AI. About designers having to relearn their craft entirely to work with AI. And of course if...
Earlier today I stumbled again upon a wonderful short piece on Sad Truths On What It’s Like To Be A Designer by Michael McWatter. It’s an honest and on-point overview of some little sad truths that many of us experience in our careers. As it has turned out, being a designer ...
🌟 Data vs. Findings vs. Insights in UX #
In many companies, data, findings and insights are all used interchangibly. Slack conversations circle around convincing data points, statistically significant findings, reliable insights and emerging trends. Unsurprisingly, often co...
So we want to set up a new design system for your product. How do we get it up and running from scratch? Do we start with key stakeholders, UI audits, or naming conventions? And what are some of the critical conversations we need to have early to avoid problems down the line...
Think about your past projects. Did they finish on time? Did they get delivered without cutting corners? Chances are high that they haven’t. Perhaps they got delayed, moved, cancelled, “refined” or postponed. As it turns out, in many teams, shipping on time is an exception, ...
🔥 UX & Design Files Organization Template (Google Doc + .zip-file), with an overview of little helpers to neatly organize UX assets in sensible folders ↓
UX & Design Files Organization Template, by Courtney Pester
Full folder structure template (Google Doc)
Compress...
When you design an interface, which pronouns do you usually use to address your users? Do you write “My account” or “Your account”? “My drafts” or “Your drafts” — or only “Drafts”? And does it actually matter?
In this newsletter, we’ll shine some light on the different meani...
When it comes to URLs, there’s a common assumption that most people don’t pay attention to them. That people don’t even notice URLs, don’t remember them, and that they can always re-find what they are looking for anyway. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.
People do...
With AI upon us, companies have recently been turning their attention to “synthetic” user testing — AI-driven research that replaces UX research. There, questions are answered by AI-generated “customers”, human tasks “performed” by AI agents.
However, it’s not just for desk ...
User journey maps are a remarkably effective way to visualize user’s experience for the entire team. Instead of pointing to documents scattered across remote fringes of Sharepoint, we bring key insights together — in one single place.
Let’s explore a couple of helpful custom...
When I start any UX project, typically there is very little confidence in the successful outcome of my UX initiatives. In fact, there is quite a lot of reluctance and hesitation, especially from teams that have been burnt by empty promises and poor delivery in the past.
Good...
How do you know what UI component to choose? 🌳 Decision trees offer a systematic approach for design teams to document their design decisions. Once we’ve decided what UI components we use and when, we can avoid never-ending discussions, confusion and misunderstanding.
Let’s ...
Many job openings in UX assume very specific roles with very specific skills. Product designers should be skilled in Figma. Researchers should know how to conduct surveys. UX writers must be able to communicate brand values.
The Many Roles In UX #
Successful candidates must...
You can find more details on design patterns and UX strategy in How To Measure UX 🍣 — with a live UX training coming up this year. Free preview.
No design exists in isolation. As designers, we often imagine specific situations in which people will use our product. It mi...
The goal of the content design is to reduce confusion and improve clarity. Yet often it’s difficult to pin point a problem as user feedback tends to be not specific enough. But: we can use a few simple techniques to assess how users understand and perceive content. Let’s tak...
Complex data tables are difficult to get right. They always come along with filters, sorting, customization options, batch actions, cell states, pagination, and a huge amount of data. Their purpose is to help people find insights, by comparing data points across rows and col...
Sometimes design conversations take slightly more time and effort than needed. One of the frequent conversations is circling around badges, pills, chips and tags.
How are they different? What purpose do they serve? Which ones do we need in our design system? And how to choos...
Newsletter pop-ups are everywhere. You’ve just landed on a website, yet here it is, a shiny newsletter pop-up, asking for your email address for reminders, updates or an exclusive 15% coupon code. People hate it, businesses love it. But does it work? As it turns out, it’s co...
Why do we see login forms split into multiple screens everywhere? Instead of typing email and password, we have to type email, move to the next page, and then type password there. This seems to be inefficient, to say the least.
Let’s see why login forms are split across scre...
Both hiding and disabling features can be utterly confusing to users. And for both, we need very, very good reasons. Let’s take a closer look at what we need to consider when it comes to hiding and disabling — and possible alternatives that help enhance the UX.
Show What’s N...
As designers, especially in large enterprises, we often might feel misunderstood and underappreciated. It might feel like every single day you have to fight for your users, explain yourself and defend your work. It’s unfair, exhausting, painful and frustrating.
Let’s explore...
Digital sustainability is often seen as a technical concern for engineers. We speak about optimization of assets, and web performance, and server efficiency. In fact, we rarely explore sustainability from the perspective of design and UX. But what if we did?
Let’s explore a ...
Children start interacting with the web when they are 3–5 years old. How do we design for children? What do we need to keep in mind while doing so? And how do we meet the expectations of the most demanding users you can possibly find: parents? Well, let’s find out.
Embrace P...
So what if you need a bit of inspiration for accordions, or footers, or dashboards, or maps, or perhaps hover states? In this single post, you’ll find all of them — a curated list of design showcases for various design components and themes — from UI components to patterns, ...
When it comes to designing for mobile, there is always quite a bit of confusion between all the different units, guidelines and measurements in iOS and Android. Here’s a quick cheat sheet (PDF) to help you get started with your mobile app design.
Key Takeaways #
For Androi...
Redesigns are often expensive, time-consuming and incredibly risky. Of course sometimes big-bang-redesigns are necessary, yet more often than not they can be avoided with a series of strategic incremental changes. Here are a few things to keep in mind before launching a big-...
So you want to conduct UX research, yet you find yourself constrained — by wrong assumptions and wrong expectations about what UX research actually entails. Research doesn’t have to be time-consuming. It doesn’t have to be expensive. And it doesn’t have to be disruptive. Let...
Every screen you interact with has multiple personalities: blank state, loading state, partial state, error state and ideal state. How To Fix a Bad User Interface highlights strategies to avoid awkward and confusing UIs with the UI Stack, carefully designing personalities fo...
Good research is always rooted in the past, not in the future. Net Promotion Score has many flaws: in how it asks users to predict their future behavior, the Likert scale and the statistically unreliable score calculation. There are better alternatives.
1. How Net Promoter S...
Often misunderstandings don’t just cause confusion. They bring team members apart, erode trust and produce waste. They often come from wrong assumptions and unrealistic expectations.
Of course every UX task is different. But every task requires a shared understanding about t...
