šŸ“¹ New! Remote User Testing - Get video + voice feedback on designs and prototypes
Read more

Category

Viewpoint

Pretty much any time we design something new, we start at the middle. See, the middle is when someone has a problemā€”sheā€™s bored, she has a question, she needs to get somewhere, she wants to buy somethingā€” and voila! She whips out this New Thing weā€™ve designed, goes through this amazing experience weā€™ve crafted, and merrily solves her problem. Happy… Read More →

When I started as a designer, fresh out of school, I thought I was ready to be a real professional. I would be creating elegant interfaces that would delight users and solve their problems. At least I thought I would. Those years in school taught me a lot. Research, project planning, teamwork, prototyping. Buckets of theory about devices and interfaces,… Read More →

Imagine a world where weā€™d know the impact that an experience would have before we shipped it. This is not as impossible as it sounds, and most product companies are or have been building experiences this way for a few years now. Popularised by e-commerce sites and lean startups, validating design decisions by A/B testing and hard data is commonplace… Read More →

Thereā€™s a lot of pressure on designers to be excellent right from the start. But thatā€™s just not realistic. When you start a project, you donā€™t know what the right solution is yet. The power of early sketching and realisation of any problemā€™s complexities is best explored and understood in the very freedom of mapping out everything in the early… Read More →

After working 4 years in the field of digital design I got obsessed with tidying up and sorting information. This lead to the creation of a systematic approach for designing user interfaces. It is an object-oriented, programming-inspired approach, a collection of various ideas that are universal. Use it for working with your favourite design software or for coding. It helps… Read More →

Last May, we announced a new look for Instagram, inside and outside the app. We created a new Instagram app icon and a set of unified icons for Hyperlapse, Layout, and Boomerang. Weā€™ve also refreshed the user interface with a simpler, more consistent design that helps peopleā€™s photos and videos shine. Inspiration When Instagram was founded, it was a place… Read More →

We have been living in a world of ā€˜clean and minimalā€™ for quite some time, so whatā€™s next? Over the last several months, some of the leaders of innovative design have taken ā€˜minimal designā€™ to the next level. Facebook, Airbnb and Apple have followed a similar blueprint to simplify prominent products in a way that reflects this new trend of… Read More →

Empathy is a buzzword in the tech industry. Although itā€™s important to work to understand the needs of the humans using our products, sometimes it seems like we talk about empathy more than we actually do it. “Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings ofĀ another.” Silicon Valley is a notoriously insular place to work. During the two… Read More →

Being pretty self-taught as far as UI design goes, Iā€™ve always wondered why so many articles and books talk about color theory and palettes. In my experience, using a ā€œsplit complementary paletteā€ is about 0% predictive of me making nice-looking designs. I have another word for that sort of thing: useless. “So if color theory doesnā€™t provide a solid basis… Read More →

I am a product designer. I design products thinking about how the person that will use them will experience those products. I could have chosen different paths but this is what I love to doā€¦and here are a few reasons why: It is a service for others The design process, the creation of the product, what features it should have,… Read More →

Traditionally, user experience initiatives focus on the product, but that may not be the most impactful place to start. Most organizations are built upon the premise that the product offering forms the nucleus of their value proposition to customers. Marketing, or ā€˜content,ā€™ is merely a promotional layer on top. For B2B organizations in particular, this model is backwards and has… Read More →

We all stand on the shoulders of giants. This is the first in a series of posts that show how we at Philosophie hone tools and processes against the whetstone of day-to-day practice. Sometimes we find something interesting about the technique or find some hack that makes it better. This is how we want to share it back with the… Read More →

Categories