Design Thoughts

Whether you’ve graduated from a short course or a degree, when you first enter the workplace you’ll learn 100 times more than you’d ever imagine. Sure, you’ll learn more techniques and practises, but the soft skills you’ll pick up are just as valuable. You’ll learn more about yourself, others and how to deal with certain situations (think office politics). “When… Read More ￫

If you’re working on digital products, you have already read dozens of articles describing how and why the hamburger navigation on mobile (and desktop!) hurts UX metrics due of its low discoverability and efficiency. (You can read some of best articles on the topic here, here, here, and here.) Luckily, more and more sites and apps are experimenting with alternative,… Read More ￫

My head has been wrapping itself around boxes. Organising them, resizing them and generally just being made aware that they exist. If you haven’t already guessed it, this next post in my Dear Developer series of learning HTML and CSS is of course about the Box Model. Not, in fact, figurative boxes. After a long holiday in the Caribbean and… Read More ￫

This is a resource guide to complement the ‘Intro to UX Design’ course run by IF Academy. Visit their website for upcoming course dates. Also see Part 2 (Agile & Lean UX), Part 3 (UX Research) or the full Table of Contents. In this article we cover: What is a good user experience design? The need to balance business, user and… Read More ￫

As a designer, your toolbox empowers you to do research, define personas, explore UX patterns, lo-fi sketch, and even refine what agile design means. It’s time to apply these skills to the one product that needs it most – yourself. Before you embrace this concept, let’s paint a picture. You’re a design consultant and you’ve been hired to lead the… Read More ￫

You can build the best product in the world, but if nobody knows it exists can it really be the best? Getting discovered can be as important as creating a great product nowadays. This has lead to many startups creating products the other way round: instead of ‘build it, and they will come’, it’s become: ‘go to where they are,… Read More ￫

I spoke this week at a General Assembly Q&A session with 25 freshly minted graduates from their UX course. Many of the questions centred around how to structure portfolios ready for interview, how design at Atlassian works and how to break into the UX and design industry. 1 question really stood out to me. “As a designer, what’s the hardest… Read More ￫

I was born in the age where people still wrote on paper for their school homework and back then I was obsessed with handwriting. Honestly, it was kind of a problem and I might have looked fairly psycho to anyone who flicked through a notebook of mine as I’d test a new one out every two weeks. Computers stole this… Read More ￫

It is clear that intelligent algorithms such as deep learning, machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc. will have a major impact on the world. However, what isn’t clear is how these technologies can be used to solve real problems for people. At Philosophie we work on experiences that help humans in their day-to-day tasks. We hope to join the benefits of… Read More ￫

In its first era, design was seen as a problem solver; it has now moved into a second era where it’s seen as a creator of meaningful experiences. “The design discipline, similar to its industry, has undergone a specialization process.” From Design to Experience Design The design discipline, similar to its industry, has undergone a specialization process. Numerous job titles… Read More ￫

Can we design invisible interfaces to be useful smart products? Last year saw an explosion of a special kind of smart products: home assistants, driving devices, lighting & security systems, etc — all devices activated by voice, gesture or automated through a chain of conditions. Major topics in media technology and Google searches were “IoT” and “Bots” — and this… Read More ￫

Marvel were this month’s hosts for Design Club – the event series where the creative community figure out what’s next. We heard from Tom Cavill, the designer and founder of bricklane.com — a property ISA which allows anyone to invest in residential property from as little as £100; and from Joyce Li, a product designer at ustwo and the driving… Read More ￫