Joshua Mauldin is a design leader and visual artist who got his start creating websites for bands. Since then, he’s designed 5-star mobile apps and built stellar high-performing design teams. These days he designs, writes, speaks on topics like getting into product design, integrating mindfulness into the creative process, cross-team collaboration, and embracing healthy conflict at work. He is currently writing a book on that last one. When designing digital products, he approaches whatever he’s working on with as much curiosity, humanity, and courage he can muster. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Alison (an incredible partner), his dog Charlie (a very good boy), and his cat Frankie (she kind of tolerates him).
Let’s explore how to give and receive better feedback when working remotely — feedback that is actionable, specific, kind, and that won’t set you on edge. We’ll start by explaining when feedback sessions don’t work and how to prevent it.
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After a few years of designing products for clients, I began to feel fatigued. I wondered why. Turns out, I’d been chasing metric after metric. “Increase those page views!” “Help people spend more time in the app!” And it kept coming. Still, something was missing. I knew that meeting goals was part of what a designer does, but I could see how my work could easily become commoditized and less fulfilling unless something changed.
I thought of how bored I’d be if I kept on that path. I needed to build some guiding principles that would help me find my place in design. These principles would help grow and would shape my career in a way that fits me best.
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Something interactive will almost always communicate more than a picture ever could, and you’ll have better conversations because of it. On the other hand, Sketch is an excellent UI design tool, lightweight and quite powerful, and it works great with Flinto, InVision and the like because they live in the borderlands of flat images and HTML or native code. In this article, Joshua Mauldin will talk you through why you should prototype and how you can do it with Sketch and prototyping tools such as Flinto and InVision. He’ll also get a nicely documented freebie Sketch file to help you.
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The reason why app store reviews aren’t as effective as they could be is that they’re a one-way conversation, asking the user to say something positive to everyone else. There should be something better, something more conversational. In this article, Joshua Mauldin will investigate the various tactics of prompting for app reviews and ratings and how to make them better. He’ll also talk about how to ask users for feedback in a way that benefits everyone. Getting feedback on your app is important. How else can people tell you that your app is doing well or poorly?
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Joshua Mauldin started with style guides with the desire to make it simple to maintain and grow a design. One of the first questions, understandably, was why use Fireworks for a style guide? For him, it was mostly because of symbols and styles. Sure, you could use similar things in Photoshop, but he found Fireworks’ implementation to be smarter. In this article, you will find out why you would want to set up a style guide using Fireworks, and you’ll also get a little starter template that Joshua likes to use.
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With a solid foundation, the house is stable, and building on it is easy. With a solid grid, your design can easily be adapted to accommodate whatever changes come along. Today, we’ll share iOS Grid System, which I’ve been using when designing apps in Adobe Fireworks.
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