Design Thoughts

When the term ‘Design Thinking’ first emerged on the scene, I found it completely puzzling. People were treating it as if it was a revolutionary new methodology to produce better products and services. They were talking about how entire companies were adopting this new approach, and those companies were becoming more competitive in the marketplace and seeing huge increases in… Read More ￫

Everything you need to know about conducting useful user interviews Creating products based on your own needs is easy – if you’re building something just for yourself, you don’t need to talk to anyone else because you know what you want. It’s pretty unlikely that you’ll ever design a product for yourself. If you want to make a product that… Read More ￫

A recent internal email chain at IDEO discussed the question of Design Thinking vs. Agile at IDEO. The question: how does IDEO differentiate the Design Thinking process from Agile? Below is my response, which I’m publishing here for future reference and with the hope that it might be useful for others.(The following is copy/pasted from our email thread, with a… Read More ￫

User testing and usability studies are as important on day one as they are when you have millions of users. When your internal resources are virtually non-existent, you still have a few great ways to understand your target audience and start testing how they’ll relate to your young idea. 1. Moderated User Testing For those of you who have the capacity… Read More ￫

Be yourself Be confident in your skills and ability. Work in your own style rather than following someone else’s. It’s crucial to carve out your own design journey and not be too sidetracked by what others are doing. “You can become a good designer following others, but you’ll become a great designer telling your own story.” Embrace feeling like an imposter After a… Read More ￫

As you probably already guessed this article is dedicated to blue color. Without a doubt, blue is one of the best colors in UI design, and one of the most frequent. Just look at your smartphone app icons, and you’ll see that a lot of them are blue: Facebook, Twitter, Shazam, Safari, etc. So why is blue the best-chosen color?… Read More ￫

There is this belief that the hand cursor means “clickable”, but this is incorrect and potentially problematic. My hope is that by the end of the article, you’ll never want to use the hand cursor for buttons ever again. The hand does not mean clickable It’s no accident that browsers don’t give buttons (and other elements) a hand cursor —it’s… Read More ￫

Ever struggled with managing your projects or PMs trying to do so? Well, there is an app… hmm… or something different for that. Recently I took on the Design Council’s Double Diamond process, “revamped” it, and published it (Link at the end of the post). People have questioned how my approach would relate to “real” project management and projects. This… Read More ￫

“A Design sprint is a time-constrained, five-phase process that uses design thinking to reduce the risk when bringing a new product, service or a feature to the market.” If you’re thinking about doing your first sprint ever, follow this article when talking with clients, developers, and even designers. Use the accompanying documents, and practice how to introduce, frame, and pitch… Read More ￫

True innovation — the journey of creating and distributing outstanding new-to-the-world customer value — is critical to the success of every modern business. In times of increasing disruptive threads, immensely decreasing company life spans and sped-up adoption rates, innovation activities have become a crucial precondition for survival. Simply put, if we don’t innovate, our business will become obsolete eventually. “Innovation… Read More ￫

UI vs. UX Design If you’ve done any kind of research about software design, you’ve probably heard of the terms “UI” and “UX”. But what separates UI from UX? At their most simple forms, UX design is what makes an interface useful, and UI design is what makes an interface beautiful. For UI, this includes a blend of visual hierarchy… Read More ￫

Since the first iPhone, standard screens have been the medium for which we’ve been designing for most – usually apps and websites. As technology has advanced though, new avenues have slowly emerged (e.g. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality) through which we can consume media and information in different ways. “VR and AR are just 2 realms we can design for… Read More ￫