Design systems, growing your design team, providing better design feedback, and more UX this week
What’s hot in UX this week:
What’s hot in UX this week:
Said no user ever →
“Hey honey, what’s the URL of that super immersive microsite we visited last week?”
“I love shopping on ecommercesite.com because I love how responsive the website is between mobile and desktop. Look at the way these modules stack. So seamless.”
Designing the perfect slider →
Sliders’ dos and don’ts and things to keep in mind when designing one. But first, when does a slider make sense in the first place?
Design systems and creativity: unlikely allies →
As the title suggests, a chat about a common gripe about pattern-based design and development: “But patterns stifle creativity, man!” — by Brad Frost
A design system grammar →
The structural approach that causes existing design systems to fail, and an alternative solution that encourages the composition of properties instead of cataloguing complete components.
Designing for accessibility: color contrast →
Optimizing a website for accessibility is largely a developer’s task. However, there are a number of guidelines that a designer can directly address. — by Neil Shankar
UX patterns that can’t be taught →
Designed inconveniences: a type of user experience pattern (usually frustrating or not optimal) that indirectly controls a user flow and impacts a decision making process. — by Juan J. Ramirez
Human-centered machine learning →
Machine learning is a powerful tool for creating personalized and dynamic experiences, and it’s already driving everything from Netflix recommendations to autonomous cars. — by Jess Holbrook
Setting yourself up to interview →
Product design is a tough field to break into. But it is definitely possible. Here are some tips learned along the way. — by Eytan Davidovits
Why hire more designers? →
For those working on getting buy-in to hire another designer in their companies, and who are currently a design team of one. — by Julie Zhuo
A framework for providing better feedback →
Difficult conversations don’t come natural to most people. But here’s a framework for critical feedback, divided by the polls of positivity/negativity and vapid/substantive feedback. — by Andrew Coyle
News & Ideas
Google now has a feed, and has resurrected Google Glass
This video of Obama created by AI shows how scary our future will be
A breakdown of how big tech companies got their first users
A map with Facebook’s most used emoji per country
This animator recorded himself walking in 100 different ways
This project explores the difference between Roman & Chinese type
Are you solving the right (user) problem?
This interactive article from Outside is simple and cool
Airbnb’s design team on the challenge of designing for China
Google’s next design project is designing AI
Apple launched a blog on research & dev in Machine Learning
Tools & Resources
Pikatool: comparison of the most popular prototyping software
Contrast is a macOS app to quickly test WCAG color contrast ratios
Wordmark lets you test and compare hundreds of different typefaces
Supernova claims to turn Sketch files into native apps in minutes
Flow is a typeface built for wireframing
Savee is a place to save design inspiration
DesignResources.party is pretty self-explanatory
Kactus is a design version control tool to keep your team in sync
Transmit5 is a MacOS tool for uploading and managing files
UX Scenarios: a node project to generate scenarios into .csv
Sixty lets your website visitors schedule screen share sessions
A year ago…
Drawing the Calendar →
Sometime in the fall of last year I began to draw my calendar.
My weeks were packed with a series of interlocking jobs and I couldn’t keep them straight. Tiny calendars on my computer weren’t cutting it. I needed something tangible — I needed a calendar-as-artifact.
The drawn calendar is not for minutiae, but for overview, for the ability to both understand the rhythm of coming weeks at a glance, and for the pleasure of ticking off time.
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