Today’s article is about understanding what is aesthetic design and its importance for the perception of usability. Humans like pretty and shiny design; they desire it much more than functional one. We enjoy looking and using aesthetically pleasing design, because it satisfies our senses, it gives us pleasure. Designers tend to think of aesthetics as the visuals of the design…. Read More ￫

A guide, not a template The first thing a good UX Designer should tell you about creating a persona is that if you just blindly follow a template, you have missed the point. User research should inform the layout — don’t let the layout constrain the research. Put simply, don’t just follow a template. Sadly, this advice is not very helpful… Read More ￫

Welcome to Dear Developer’s entry seven. It’s the dawn of summer in London, providing bundles of vitamin D and some once in a blue moon smiling faces. Including my own. And what better to whack a smile on your face on top of the sunny weather than a little HTML hack? That’s what I thought. If you’ve been following this… Read More ￫

Designing for a cause is celebrated at Marvel and recently we’ve been seeing inspiring stories emerge one after the other about sharing knowledge and empowering others. Last week on Twitter, Pablo Stanley’s design workshop for children was circulating the masses and we were overwhelmed to see that Marvel was playing a part in the lesson! Happy as Larry, we grabbed… Read More ￫

In this article I am keen to take you through my process of building the new custom logotype for Marvel, from sketch to final product. I post work in progress on Dribbble and tweet about it onTwitterand using Instagram at the same time. Introduction Marvel is a design, prototyping an collaboration application based in London, UK. Marvel’s co-founder Murat Mutlu… Read More ￫

Concepts and Methodologies To Live By At the time I’m writing this post, I’ve been a full-time product designer for ~ 3 years, though my overall professional career is closer to ~ 8 years. Every couple of months I would sit down and braindump lessons learned and methodologies I’d absorbed from work, Meetups, articles, podcasts, etc. As a believer in paying… Read More ￫

For the first 10 years of my career, I worked exclusively for clients. First as a freelancer and then later in the context of my design shop, Sputnik. In those years, I worked for some amazing people, but I also worked for a small number of really awful people. As much as you try to do your homework on the… Read More ￫

We are all looking for self-expression and inspiration. We express ourselves through fashion, music, art, and through furniture. Houzz is an interior design app that has thousands of furniture inspirations for users to express their styles. After talking to friends and interviewing users I found that out of the people I talked to there were 3 main categories: New-movers furnishing… Read More ￫

The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias that can influence the outcome and perceived value of products to a large degree. People tend to place high value on products they have partially created. Hence, the name IKEA effect. It is derived from the Swedish furniture retailer, famous for products that require being assembled by its customers. Products designed by IKEA… Read More ￫

tl;dr: If a user experience needs an explanation, something is fundamentally broken. Consider redesigning the experience until people no longer need it explained to them. As Blaise Pascal wrote, “I made this [letter] very long only because I have not had the leisure to make it shorter.” In hundreds of languages, over thousands of years, people have known that reducing text… Read More ￫

Why three little lines are hurting your UX Oh, the hamburger menu. Recently, I was reviewing my work on a mobile app with another designer, when he asked me why I didn’t use a hamburger menu for the app’s main navigation. The question caught me off guard. I paused for a second as I asked myself, ‘Why didn’t I do that?’… Read More ￫

7 design principles that help users perceive your work in a more effective manner