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 ￫

Software is meant to be, above all things, useful. When we think about something useful we cannot help but think about the users (good thing we can’t). What if we were to build the best application ever but no one ever used it? So much for the usefulness of it, right? “There are multiple kinds of users implicated on a… Read More ￫

Design jobs are flooding the tech space with more rigor now than ever before. Companies are hiring designers specializing in interaction, UX, UI, and research to grow their established design teams. But for the majority this is not the case. You will probably at some point be one of the company’s first designer. I received the first designer role as… Read More ￫

Last week, I was reading Michael Horton’s article entitled “Complexion Reduction: a new trend in Mobile Design” and it got me thinking. In his article, he presents what he thinks is a new trend in mobile design which takes mobile minimal design a step further. Basically, it means that more and more apps look strangely alike: Complexion Reduction means white… 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 ￫

In each entry in this “conversation” series I talk to a designer/product manager/engineer on a topic. I want to make basic practical skills education transparent and free. Today I am speaking to Ravi Akella who currently runs the product team at the Digital Manufacturing Group at Autodesk and is on the PM Leadership Team at Autodesk. His team of product… Read More ￫

“Why should a designer write?” When talking to designers about the importance of content and sharing ideas, this is a common question that comes up. Many designers create a personal website to showcase their portfolio, add their contact information, and that’s about it. There can often be limited written works, with the focus mainly on design outcomes and graphic elements…. 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 ￫

Let’s say that one day, I wrote out the steps of a typical UCD-based process on a whiteboard (just pick any reputable textbook)…and then someone walked into that room, memorised this process as a template or recipe and then executed it accurately — is that person now a designer? That’s exactly the question a professor asked our class, in the… Read More ￫

This week’s design principle is focusing on Hick’s Law, which is related to the KISS principle. Let’s first say a few words to introduce Hick’s Law. Do you remember the old video games from before 20 years and how much fun it was to play them. The controls were so simple you could learn to play in seconds. For example,… Read More ￫

An introduction to Product Management A product manager defines, decides and helps the company ship the right features in a product. So, for example, if you see the launch of Facebook reactions on your feed the product manager at Facebook worked with people to define, prioritize and ship it. There are three key words here: Define. Decide. Ship. Define: Product Managers… Read More ￫

In preparation for my upcoming course on Sketch and SVG workflows, I’ve spoken with a bunch of designers, both junior and senior, about their use of the format. And I’ve noticed a common misunderstanding about SVG: “We often expect SVG to behave like a bitmap graphic—like a PNG with infinite resolution. But it really isn’t.” For one, certain things are more… Read More ￫