Most of us carry the dead weight of an undefined process. We’re too passive, or ignorant, or foolish, or dismissive, or proud when it comes to our workflow. And that’s where we lose. Being ignorant of our process is to be ignorant of how long things really take, or where opportunities for improvement, in skill or outcome, are hidden. In all this we lose control of our intellectual and creative growth, letting too many opportunities slip to become the designers (or developers or writers) we aspire to be. In this article, Alexander Charchar will show you how to master your time and schedule, and how to have more control to make more (and better) choices.
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DAU (noun) Daily active users. Hip-hop (noun) If you got to ask, you ain’t got it. In this article, Benjamin Hersh will talk about the unique challenges of designing a hip-hop app as he led design for one of the few successful apps in that space. Benjamin will share insights from his research and design process, and the lessons he and his team learned about the DAU of hip hop. This is not strictly an article about technical innovations. Benjamin’s focus is how an awareness of complex cultural issues can be critical for good app design.
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There is no such thing as a project that goes off well without some level of planning. You’re just not the one doing it. You can keep complaining, or you can change it. You’re a designer, which means you’re capable of imagining a better version of the world than the one you’re living in. And yet there you are, stuck at the back. In this article, Robert Hoekman Jr. will share some of the reasons it happens. And how to stop being an afterthought.
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In this second part, Yury Vetrov will show you how he made his “Bootstrap on steroids” more powerful. A framework like this has many benefits, but the main result is a transition from large redesigns every couple of years to constantly updated designs. We can spend more time evolving a product rather than doing endless design maintenance. Moreover, product designers stop thinking in screens and become less like “Photoshop/Sketch people”.
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As with everything, it’s all about communication. Many clients expect a visual design up front, because that’s what they’re used to getting. They don’t know any better. Your job is to explain to them why this is impossible. Enlighten them about the millions of different interaction methods and feature sets out there, and help them understand that you cannot capture all of that in a static design. But before we start flipping things around, let’s take a quick stroll down memory lane, just so we know where we’ve come from and where we are now.
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We view our design approaches as intuitive and emotional, so we have a hard time developing documented, human-focused design processes. Designers can create in-depth, documented case studies of their work. The best ones clarify the complex choices designers have to make and explain their thinking behind UX and visual decisions. In this article, Senongo Akpem analyzes some key features of case studies and provides tips on how to use them to humanize your process of design.
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Mail.Ru Group has about 40 products — even more if you add mobile and tablet websites and apps, promo websites, etc. Yury Vetrov’s team deals with almost half of them. Their goal is to update these products and unify them around several guidelines. Continue reading of Part Two. In this article Yury will discuss the transformation of their design process from the classic Prototype → Design Mockup → HTML → Implement approach for every screen to a modern and more efficient framework-based approach.
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In a previous article, Svetlin Denkov briefly mentioned another category of clickthrough prototypes: widget-based mockups that are designed on the target device and that expand on sketches by introducing user interface (UI) details and increased visual fidelity. These prototypes can be used to pitch ideas to clients, document interactions and even test usability. In this article, he will teach you how to use the iPad app Blueprint to put together such prototypes in the form of concept demos, which help to manage a client’s expectations when you are aligning your visions of a product.
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During brainstorming sessions, UX professionals would generate concepts as paper or whiteboard sketches. But this artifacts limit participants from visualizing interactivity and the system’s flow. In this article Svetlin Denkov will look at clickthrough prototyping on the iPhone with the Prototyping on Paper (or POP) app. His goal is to introduce the tool, share his prototyping experience and discuss competitors.
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Working walls are known by countless names. Underlying them all is a single idea: that physically pinning our sources of inspiration and work in progress can help us to rearrange concepts and unlock breakthrough insights. According to Vyas and his colleagues at the University of Twente, designers integrate these surfaces “artfully” and organize information in such a way that it empowers them to visualize and extend their work in progress.
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