Viewpoint

How my Sketch file started: a separate artboard for every type of Yammer thread. There were lots. Reducing our design handoff from 30 mockups to just one I’ve recently begun working on a design revamp of Yammer’s Android app, beginning with conforming all Yammer conversations to a 4px vertical grid for better readability. Because a single misaligned pixel could throw off the… Read More ￫

As designers, we create user flows and give them to developers, product managers, clients, and sometimes even users for testing. At its best, a user flow is a concise, clean, and compelling way to showcase the scope and vision of your application before it is developed. Oftentimes user flows are the key piece of documentation that we provide developers to… Read More ￫

I have a lot of friends who work in Growth, but I never really knew exactly what they did. Whenever our conversations turned towards “growth stuff”, I would always just smile, nod, and occasionally contribute a, “that’s really cool!” It’s not like I was clueless. I mean, I had an idea of what “Growth” meant — growing users, making money,… Read More ￫

Over the past year, I’ve been mentoring students on Designlab, an online bootcamp for new designers. During weekly 1:1 sessions, I help answer any questions that students have. One of the questions I get asked often: What should I know to succeed at my first design role? Here are the things I wish I knew before starting my first design gig,… Read More ￫

Conversational interfaces have reduced user experience down to a few lines of text. With chatbots, UX becomes conversational, products talk back, and persona’s now go both ways. Every chatbot has a voice — which means every bot needs a personality. If conversational computing means personality is the new user experience, how do we approach the design of these nuanced digital… Read More ￫

A selection of prototypes, photos, and learnings from Design Club at a special CoderDojo We recently joined CoderDojo London to deliver two days of workshops for 7–17 year-olds. We were hosted by UCL at Base KX, near Kings Cross. There were tables dotted about, offering coding activities. There were computers everywhere. Except on our table. We we were unplugged. Okay,… Read More ￫

“Dashboard”, “Big Data”, “Data visualization”, “Analytics” — there’s been an explosion of people and companies looking to do interesting things with their data. I’ve been lucky to work on dozens of data-driven interfaces throughout my career and I wanted to share some thoughts on how to arrive at a distinct and meaningful product. Many people have already tackled this topic,… Read More ￫

So, your company wants to increase revenue and adoption by making some marketing site tweaks. They want more conversions, more clicks, more shares, and more users. What do they tell you to do first? Well, A/B test! Compare two versions of a page, define a key goal (ex. clicks), and see if you get more clicks. But, does this actually… Read More ￫

I had previously written “7 things I wished designers did more of when working with developers.” It may be tough for both sides to hear the tips but it wouldn’t be fair for me to write a similar article for developers, right? So here it is. In order to create great products, collaboration between developers and designers is key. Although… Read More ￫

A good product is a lot about the problem that you pick & the ideas that you implement. But a well-sorted & deliberate Design handoff document and a process can play more than a handy role; ironing out quite a few wrinkles that can cause unnecessary escalations and ad-hoc duct-taping later during the execution phase. "As designers, we are the… Read More ￫

A mechanical engineer by training, I’ve always chaffed at using the word process to describe something as messy and nonlinear as design. At MIT, I learned about processes for solving problems like how quickly heat moves through a block of metal, or how to calculate the impedance in an electrical circuit. To me, a process is something with a set… Read More ￫

I’ve been designing in the iOS space for the past few years, and sometimes there was friction at the handoff between design and development. Everything changed when I learned how to code in Swift. Fresh out of art school, my design process looked something like this: design an interface, get my art director to review it, update it, get my… Read More ￫