Design Thoughts

A deep dive into the 4 distinct types of deliverables including the do’s and don’ts.

What is Design Thinking? “Design thinking is a human-centred approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” — Tim Brown, president and CEO, IDEO Design thinking is a fluid, research and data-driven approach to identifying a problem, the people it affects, exploring solutions… Read More ￫

This is the second of three articles about our journey growing a culture of accessibility at Trade Me. For tips on getting started, see ‘Growing a culture of accessibility at Trade Me’. After understanding a bit more about our users’ needs and making some progress towards a more inclusive product, we started working towards getting buy-in from our peers. If… Read More ￫

Whether you’re a recent convert to working from home or a seasoned pro and have been working remotely for a while, sometimes it’s easy to forget that there are other ways to help keep your designer mind ticking over in a healthy manner. Here’s a roundup of resources that fall into 5 main categories that any remote designer can use… Read More ￫

What is User Experience? User Experience (UX) is the value that you provide to your users when they are using your product. It is a term that is mostly associated with beautiful looking User Interfaces. But, by principle: User Experience Design (UXD or UED) “is the process of enhancing user satisfaction with a product by improving the usability, accessibility, and… Read More ￫

“If you could go back in time, what career advice would you give your younger self?” This is a question I’ve started to get asked a lot recently. I’m generally someone who prefers to look forward rather than reminisce about what could have been, but upon recent reflection of this question, I realized that there was an epiphany that I… Read More ￫

Design has become conceptual in that it is no longer perceived merely as a form of giving life to a product, a visuality or an object only. Design has been steadily expanding into the corporate strategy world; organisations are increasingly applying design methods to develop their competitive advantage. This growing interest in design may be linked to the increasing role… Read More ￫

We’re excited to launch our awesome free field guide for individuals and teams that have always wanted to get started with usability testing but didn’t know where to start. The User Testing Field Guide helps you build your first ever user research initiative with everything you need to get buy-in, recruit, prototype, start testing and gathering results. It also contains… Read More ￫

Do you ever think about the play icon? It’s pretty… iconic. Looking at it, an incredibly high percentage of people are likely to understand, instantly, what it’s communicating and how to interact with it. This is an example of what Don Norman would refer to as an affordance: An existing relationship between an object and a person that implies an… Read More ￫

They say a picture is worth a thousand words but, honestly; I think they are worth much more. They help you build a common understanding and remove much of the complexity and nuance that comes with written and verbal language. I wanted to share 6 diagrams I find myself frequently using to when discussing Product Management ideas. These are a… Read More ￫

I know what you’re going to think. How could I possibly know about the mistakes startups make, since I’ve never run a startup myself? Well no, I haven’t run my own startup, but for the past 4 years, I have worked exclusively for and with startups across a wide range of sectors. With founders of both a technical and non-technical… Read More ￫

In my first article “Great interfaces are made of good typography”, I explained some principles to master in order to create digital interfaces which communicate effectively with good working typography. In addition to that, my other article “How art direction will help you create masterful web interfaces” shed some light on how the choice of typefaces can influence the art-direction… Read More ￫