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Get PocketPlus: How Apple, Facebook, Google, and more tech-world heavyweights describe their design jobs. Design is a rather broad and vague term. When someone says "I'm a designer," it is not immediately clear what they actually do day to day.
Designer Paul Rand once said, “An understanding of man’s intrinsic needs, and of the necessity to search for a climate in which those needs could be realized, is fundamental to the education of the designer.
Tobias van Schneider lives his life like one big side project. Today, he designs and builds new products for Spotify in New York, but he couldn’t have predicted that when he dropped out of school at age 15 to work as an apprentice in a computer shop in Austria.
Google Ventures's Michael Margolis is more productive than ever. His secret? Shortcuts. I’ve been doing design and UX research for almost 24 years. In that time, I’ve learned a lot, and I hope I’ve gotten better at it over the years.
My colleague Ajay and I have been working at incorporating lean UX at the enterprise level for over two years. In studying it, I find that there’s a temptation to lay down rules, and if the rules aren’t followed… well, then, you can’t call it lean UX.
During a recent conversation with my father-in-law, an architect with nearly 40 years of experience, I couldn’t help but notice the parallels between his work and mine.
Behind every successful design is a dynamic creative team, and it takes all kinds of personalities and skills to get the job done. However, the culture and expectations of a design agency are often largely centered on one outspoken, gregarious personality.
The field of UX is daunting without the right guidance. So many subjective questions pop up on a daily basis.
One of the biggest flubs that product teams make is confusing designs that look great with designs that actually work well. It’s a simple mistake, but it can have grave consequences: If your product doesn’t work well, no one will even care how it looks, after all.
Designer Dan Saffer’s new book, Microinteractions, makes the case that design is in the details—the very small details that make systems friendlier. Dan Saffer, like many designers, likes to quote Charles Eames.
So, you have a mobile app where there are more pages or sections than can fit on a mobile screen at once. Your first thought might be to create a tabbed design, with a row of tabs along the top or buttons along the bottom.
Lately, every app is “beautiful”. If you read tech news, you’ve seen this pageant: Beautiful charts and graphs1. Beautiful stories2. Beautiful texting3. Beautiful notebooks4. Beautiful battery information5. Aspiring to beauty in our designs is admirable.
Think about a product that you consistently, and quite happily, pay for. What does it allow you to do? Is there anything about this product that makes you think that you will be better at something? Does it feel like a shortcut to something that you aspire to be?
Science fiction author Isaac Asimov once wrote the "Three Laws of Robotics" into his Robot series of stories. These laws were permanently hard-coded into every robot as a final failsafe to prevent catastrophe and protect humanity.
Imagine this scenario. You’re hired to design a product that has a guaranteed audience of 50,000 users, right out of the gate. Your clients have a dedicated support staff with a completely predictable technology stack. Best of all, your work directly improves the quality of your users’ lives.
Flat design has been a huge hit over the years. If you have not heard of the term, you would have certainly seen this style in the digital world. A leading trend in interface design, it is so popular that it is difficult not to see or hear about it on our screens today.
Much like other professional designers I’m a big fan of the wireframing process. Although it’s mostly associated with the field of web design, the concept of project planning is ubiquitous across all creative mediums.
Only one of these weather apps is attempting to solve the real problem. There are divergent things happening in the product and interaction design community. On one hand, we have some amazing pieces of writing from the likes of Ryan Singer and Julie Zhuo, moving our craft forward.
As the craft of Web design continues to evolve, we’re recognizing the need to develop thoughtful design systems, rather than creating simple collections of web pages.
I continue to be excited by the number of startups that value design and create wonderful environments for designers to learn and grow. At the same time, designers are realizing the right startup can be an amazing place to hone their skills, build great products, and impact the world in a big way.
A designer’s process determines the difference between mediocre and great work. Natural talent and training aren’t substitutes for good design habits. The right process can cover many shortcomings of talent and skill — but the opposite is never true.
Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones brought the world Gotham, Mercury, and Archer. They had one of the most successfuland lucrativepartnerships in type design. But one of them thought it wasn’t a partnership at all.
I admit it: you intimidate me. Your work is vivid and imaginative, far superior to my woeful scratchings at a similar age. The things I struggle to learn barely make you sweat. One day, you’ll be a better designer than me.