Design Digest | January 2023
Max Stepanov
Product Design Lead. UXD, UXR, and HCI specialist. Experience in Product Design and Development, Design Management, and Digital Communication
Design Digest is a collection of articles and various design materials dedicated to the best international product and UX design
💣 Main topics:
Let's begin...
🤝 Tools
Carefully picked colors to match your interface’s challenges.
Collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions, and understand systems.
This Notion template is everything you need to get a UX audit done! It will help you evaluate the UX of a product, website, or service in order to identify areas for improvement against hundreds of guidelines.
😈 Articles
By Antoine Valot, Radical UX
Here are some visual design rules you can learn once and use many times in your career. They’re safe.
Tooltips are messages that appear when the user hovers over part of an interface — usually an icon — to explain how certain things work or what they mean.
Although they allow you to squeeze additional information on a screen, they have a number of problems.
How to use the right responsive grid and UI layout based on your design goals.
As designers and developers, we have an obligation to build experiences that are better than the norm. This article explains how unethical design happens and how to do ethical design through a set of best practices.
Build and maintain design tokens faster and more accurately
The product design playbook I use to break down and execute design projects.
Discover the latest Artificial Intelligence tools, services, and resources.
Some observations from real usability testing on what people do and what they don’t do on the web. From disabled copy-paste to magic link sign-in.
Simple rules that will help you design a streamlined first-time user experience
Stay on top of your design process with bite-sized hints and cheat sheets about UX Product Design.
Changing the round-table discussion.
Adam Silver’s recent piece “Designing a time input” where talks about the complexity of building UI widgets that circumscribe time entry through bespoke interfaces.
A lot of sites were not designed and developed with accessibility needs in mind. As designers, a lot of us think that “accessibility is the job of the developer team. Accessibility becomes an afterthought for many projects.
Templates to help you say no in any situation.
JIRA for designers — the basics
Let’s face it; it’s not the sexiest tool out there. Yet underneath the quite sophisticated UI is a powerful engine that every designer would ultimately appreciate significantly in the era of constant changes of the remote teams.
Design strategy can be seen as a meeting point between what is valuable for customers and what is profitable for businesses. Through design strategy, businesses can determine the most effective and efficient course of action to achieve their goals.
This isn’t a technical manual or a design tutorial. It’s a book of processes you can start using today to communicate accessibility strategy in a way teams can understand
Visibility of System Status exposes cause-and-effect so that we can understand what the #system is doing and decide how we want to respond.
Post Covid, reveal the mask of the mysterious city of Hong Kong, observing the great user experience design/service on the street.
Recommended by LinkedIn
🍾 Be clear about what you’re trying to achieve
🍾 Only include what’s important
🍾 Consider data-ink ratio
🍾 Round your numbers
🍾 Use the most efficient visualization
🍾 Group your related metrics
🍾 Give your numbers context …
Focus styles are visual indicators used to style elements, usually links and form elements, that have been focused by the user, either by “tabbing” using the keyboard or by clicking.
Not everything that’s round and stands out is considered to be a button. In this article, Vadim explains how you can create a proper interactive button for your users — one that shouldn’t be confused with anything else.
Three decades of UI research came together in the mice, windows, and icons used today.
🍾Creative Problem Solving (CPS),
🍾Strategic Design Thinking, and
🍾Visual Sense Making
Onboarding is the process of getting users familiar with a new interface. It can involve one or more of the following components: feature promotion, customization, and instructions.
Building your w3c standard design tokens with style dictionary
Big changes are afoot! APA endorses the use of “#they” as a singular third-person pronoun in the seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. This means it is officially good practice in scholarly writing to use the singular “they.”
This blog post provides insight into how this change came about and provides a forum for questions and feedback.
Collection of data visualizations to get inspired and find the right type.
A Cheatsheet for User Interview and Follow Ups Questions by Stéphanie Walter — UX Researcher & Designer
The 8pt Grid is one of the most commonly used Layout Grid Systems there is, and for very good reason.
In forms, displaying error messages above input fields works better.
Most interfaces place error messages under input fields, making them difficult to work with. Users need to consult the error when fixing an error, and it is usually impossible due to errors covered by virtual keyboards, browser autofill, and autocomplete.
Disabled buttons - problematic and costly
Many businesses don’t know just how much income they lose daily due to disabled buttons that eventually should become enabled. Live validation is always problematic and always causes abandonment. It’s better always to allow users to interact with buttons and inform them about errors on tap/click.
When onboarding, interactive tutorials, and walkthroughs don’t work well
A great example of it is Workday Design System, with flow charts displayed for complex components.
Autocomplete and suggestions on focus
Some users will never even spot autocomplete because they always look at the keyboard while typing. Ideally, we need to indicate with an icon (chevron, filled arrow, search icon) that the input is an interactive element and show suggestions immediately — most frequent requests, recent requests, etc. It just improves the discovery of autocomplete. Vitaly Friedman
💚 Books
1️⃣ Basics: Intercom on Product Management
How to say no, ask why, and execute.
How to manage your to-do list without stress.
How to understand others and collaborate.
4️⃣ Product sense: 100 things every Designer needs to know about People by Susan Weinschenk
How to build for real human behavior.
5️⃣ Creativity: Creativity by John Cleese
How to find bold ideas and let them flourish.
Three lessons from Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide by John Cleese
6️⃣ Strategy: Good Strategy / Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
How a good strategy identifies a challenge and approach to overcome it.
7️⃣ Research: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
How to ask for feedback and spot lies.
Interview with Rob Fitzpatrick:
8️⃣ Positioning: Obviously Awesome by April Dunford
How to place your product in a market.
9️⃣ Influence: The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane
How to influence with authenticity.
🔟 Management: The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo
How to get the best out of a team.
1️⃣1️⃣ Analytics: Lean Analytics by Eric Ries.
How to measure impact.
1️⃣2️⃣ Difficult chats. Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg
How to communicate with compassion.
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