UI Animations, Working with PMs, Becoming a Design Leader and more UX this week
What’s hot in UX this week:
What’s hot in UX this week:
Are All These UX Articles Trying To Sell You Something? →
We all read about UX online. There’s great content available out there, and once you create the right reading habit, there’s tons you can learn from the experiences other people have to share.
The question becomes: why are people sharing their experiences online, for free, for everyone to read?
Almost everything that is published in UX is written by professionals who, at some level, have a skin in the game. They are part of the industry. The big challenge in our discipline is that we don’t have a group of writers who are actively engaged and completely impartial when writing about UX; a group of people who simply cannot (and do not want to) benefit from influencing other people through writing.
Let’s look at some ways to identify what exactly they are trying to sell.
A Designer’s Guide to Working with Product Managers →
Product Managers have an enormous say on how elements in a product function. They have the power to veto a design decision or take a call on how a particular user-flow for a product is crafted. They think about how users interact with the product and analyze if the product meets the need of the intended target users. They help engineers prioritize the list of tasks that needs to be built. They are decision makers.
In short, they are superstars who work in very high-pressure environments. At any given point, there’s always more on their plates than they can handle.
Designers need to work in tandem with the goals of a PM because at the end of the day, both these stakeholders have the same vision.
We Need More Shitty Work →
Somewhere along the line it suddenly became a prerequisite that all public work has to be of amazing quality. Take Dribbble for example. A website which ironically was originally built to allow creatives to post their work-in-progress, has became a platform for over-polished design eye candy.
via Fabricio Teixeira
Design Research at Dropbox →
Every researcher wants to have impact. If research sits in a drawer, unused and unappreciated, nobody’s happy — not researchers and certainly not the organizations they support.
via Fabricio Teixeira
UI Animation: Please Use Responsibly →
Designers can take advantage of animation to solve many design problems — from reducing cognitive load to improving decision making, meaningful animations can delight and inform users. Here’s how not to overuse them.
via Caio Braga
On Design Tools and Processes →
For the past year(s) I’ve been chasing for answers. Looking for new tools, thinking about design processes and figuring out what design really means to me. At times I’ve felt so disconnected with our processes that I’ve wondered if my career choice was right…
via Fabricio Teixeira
User Interviews: Context is Everything →
These structured sessions revolve around a one-to-one interaction between the researcher and the user and are conducted in the environment where the user typically works or accesses the system in question — and that makes all the difference.
via Caio Braga
Accessibility Whack-A-Mole →
Designers sometimes like to say that design is about problem-solving. But defining design as problem-solving is of course itself problematic, which is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the realm of accessibility.
via Fabricio Teixeira
Tips for Becoming a Design Leader →
One of the things I love about working at Facebook is the emphasis we put on personal growth and the objectives people have for their careers. We believe a person shouldn’t have to be a manager in order to lead people at the company.
via Fabricio Teixeira
Learnings from Driving vs. Designing →
Learning to drive can be very similar to being a new designer. My experienced driver friends always gave me tips on how to drive safely and how to avoid unnecessary incidents, which perfectly reflected my growth journey as a designer.
via Caio Braga
News & Ideas
Facebook’s new profile flags lets you show all your nationalism
A letter about creative block, read by Benedict Cumberbatch
Animated movie posters for the Oscar nominees
Designers are not happy with Abstract, new design series on Netflix
The ultimate guide on how to pronounce GIF
Squid speak an entire language through the pigment on their skin
Radiohead’s saddest song is True Love Waits, according to data
Prospero just released a manifesto for freelance designers
Can AI help combat loneliness?
Tools & Resources
Web VR Studio claims to be “the” design app for Virtual Reality
DeployStack aggregates all the tools you’ll need to deploy a website
A cheat sheet if you’re unsure of what User Research method to use
Case Study Club is a newsletter focused only on design case studies
As expected, Café Wifi helps you find cafes with free wifi
The anatomy of a button in Sketch
3D sketches for you to explore in the browser
Work With Us aggregates design jobs in top notch companies
Brutalist Framework, for those who want to build ugly websites
A year ago…
Onboarding is half-baked; how to reduce the cognitive overload →
Pinch to zoom is not an intuitive gesture. The reason everyone “got it” was because Steve Jobs showed us and we copied.
As app designers and developers, we need to expose core concepts and build upon those over time when the user is ready. “Explaining” too many concepts, too quickly creates cognitive overload for users.
Thinking that all a user needs is a good onboarding is an anti-pattern. Instead we need to hold the user’s hand and guide them through learning our application’s lexicon.
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