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#ux: 28 posts tagged

First principles for UX design

Using first principles in UX will make your product more intuitive and more enjoyable for your customers, while making your job easier.

Nobody Wants a Big Reveal: Why Keeping Secrets Hurts Your Work

Avoid the temptation of the dramatic reveal. Here's why openness and transparency are your real competitive advantages in product development.

Inter and the Power of Fonts: Why Typefaces Matter More Than You Think

Open up the potential of your designs with a deeper understanding of what variable fonts like Inter can do.

How you do one thing is how you do everything

How you do one thing is how you do everything. This is a phrase that has been around for a long time, but what does it really mean? In this article, we will explore the meaning of this phrase and how it can be applied to your life.

Open Sourcing my Design System

I'm open sourcing the Figma file I use to design and create images for my personal site.

Statistically, nobody has used your app

People spend most of their time on sites and apps other than yours. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

The Aesthetic-Usability Effect

When building something new, what's more important: that it works, or that it looks good? The Aesthetic-Usability Effect says that users perceive more aesthetically pleasing designs as easier to use than less aesthetically pleasing designs.

Designing for hospitality

"Unreasonable Hospitality" by Will Guidara outlines how to making customers feel exceptionally special. Let's bring these hospitality principles to tech, by creating memorable experiences, and using hospitality to elevate customer satisfaction in product design, engaging with the people using our products.

Gestalt: Design principles every developer should know

Ever felt that you've seen a design that just makes sense to you, but you couldn't quite put your finger on why? There's rules for that. Let's talk about Gestalt

Build, measure, listen, rebuild

Building better products involves skills you won't learn in computer science school, or at a boot camp. Find success through testing, learning from real-world feedback, and adapting.

The product design spectrum: crowdsourcing, user research, and the myopic approach

In product design, there's a critical difference between crowdsourcing ideas and feedback, and user research.

The Decoy Effect: More options for an easier choice

The Decoy Effect is a cognitive bias that causes people to have a strong preference between two options, when presented with a third option that is inferior to one of the original options.

Breaking the cycle: Data-driven product descisions

Learn how to escape common product development pitfalls using data-driven decisions. Read how Craftwork used analytics to optimize their user experience.

Maximize user retention: the cognitive science approach...

Understand how multitasking affects your customers' memory, and improve your product design and engagement with cognitive psychology and the Zeigarnik effect.

Intellectual humility: how to be wrong productively

How to use being wrong to improve UX and product design. Learn how to embrace mistakes and create better products for your users.

Cognitive load, UX, and why you should care

Cognitive load is a concept that is important to understand that is often overlooked, and has a huge impact on both UX and the lived experience of building your product.

The math behind why cafes should have round tables

Though we don't often think of it this way, the objects and buildings around us are the result of a series of design decisions.

Perception and unexpected tricks of the mind

Explore the fascinating world of perception and cognition in the Tiny Improvements newsletter. Uncover the unexpected tricks of our minds and learn how to make tiny improvements in our cognitive abilities.

These are the books that shaped my career

A sampling of books that have had a fundamental impact on my career as a designer, developer and startup founder.

Customer experience, quality, and the hype cycle

The Gartner Hype Cycle, and its relationship with customer experience for new products and companies.

VOICE Talks August 2021: Trust the researchers for voice-first UX

#assistant
#voice
#devrel
#ux

As a part of my work as a DevRel lead for Google Assistant, I did a guest segment on VOICE Talks in August of 2021, talking about why UX research for voice-first experiences is so crucial.

Matter - a whole thing about design

#ux
#design
Cover slide: MATTER - a whole thing about design

From a talk I gave at my then-home-base Hygge Coworking at a community event. The thesis: we're all designers, and you should give a damn about the things you put into the world.

Slides are available on slideshare.

Design Matters, Hygge Zero day

#design
#ux
title slide: Design Matters, Hygge Zero day

These are slides from an empassioned talk I gave about design during a community event called Zero Day at Hygge Coworking in Charlotte, NC, USA.

The thesis: good design is important, and you should be paying attention to good-and-bad design in the world around you. Contributing to making the world better for everyone is everyone's job.

Slides are available on SlideShare

Your App is Ugly

#design
#ux
Title slide from the presentation which accompanied this talk

A rehash of a talk on the basics of design and aesthetics, covering color theory, swiss design, and some of the historical roots of modern design.

Authored with Andrew Miller, Jeremy Osborn, and Leah Cunningham

Slides are available on SlideShare

Designing Windows 8.1 apps, from the ground up

#ux
#design
#windows

This is a talk I gave at Blend Conf in Charlotte, NC USA in 2013, when I was working for Microsoft as a UX Designer. If you're interested in learning how to design apps for a version of Windows that came out in 2012, this is your day!

Slides are available on Slideshare