Design systems, growing your design team, providing better design feedback, and more UX this week
What’s hot in UX this week:
Said no user ever →
“Hey honey, what’s the URL of that super immersive microsite we visited last week?”
“I love shopping on ecommercesite.com because I love how responsive the website is between mobile and desktop. Look at the way these modules stack. So seamless.”
Designing the perfect slider →
Sliders’ dos and don’ts and things to keep in mind when designing one. But first, when does a slider make sense in the first place?
Design systems and creativity: unlikely allies →
As the title suggests, a chat about a common gripe about pattern-based design and development: “But patterns stifle creativity, man!” — by Brad Frost
A design system grammar →
The structural approach that causes existing design systems to fail, and an alternative solution that encourages the composition of properties instead of cataloguing complete components.
Designing for accessibility: color contrast →
Optimizing a website for accessibility is largely a developer’s task. However, there are a number of guidelines that a designer can directly address. — by Neil Shankar
UX patterns that can’t be taught →
Designed inconveniences: a type of user experience pattern (usually frustrating or not optimal) that indirectly controls a user flow and impacts a decision making process. — by Juan J. Ramirez
Human-centered machine learning →
Machine learning is a powerful tool for creating personalized and dynamic experiences, and it’s already driving everything from Netflix recommendations to autonomous cars. — by Jess Holbrook
Setting yourself up to interview →
Product design is a tough field to break into. But it is definitely possible. Here are some tips learned along the way. — by Eytan Davidovits
Why hire more designers? →
For those working on getting buy-in to hire another designer in their companies, and who are currently a design team of one. — by Julie Zhuo
A framework for providing better feedback →
Difficult conversations don’t come natural to most people. But here’s a framework for critical feedback, divided by the polls of positivity/negativity and vapid/substantive feedback. — by Andrew Coyle
News & Ideas
- Google now has a feed, and has resurrected Google Glass
- This video of Obama created by AI shows how scary our future will be
- A breakdown of how big tech companies got their first users
- A map with Facebook’s most used emoji per country
- This animator recorded himself walking in 100 different ways
- This project explores the difference between Roman & Chinese type
- Are you solving the right (user) problem?
- This interactive article from Outside is simple and cool
- Airbnb’s design team on the challenge of designing for China
- Google’s next design project is designing AI
- Apple launched a blog on research & dev in Machine Learning
Tools & Resources
- Pikatool: comparison of the most popular prototyping software
- Contrast is a macOS app to quickly test WCAG color contrast ratios
- Wordmark lets you test and compare hundreds of different typefaces
- Supernova claims to turn Sketch files into native apps in minutes
- Flow is a typeface built for wireframing
- Savee is a place to save design inspiration
- DesignResources.party is pretty self-explanatory
- Kactus is a design version control tool to keep your team in sync
- Transmit5 is a MacOS tool for uploading and managing files
- UX Scenarios: a node project to generate scenarios into .csv
- Sixty lets your website visitors schedule screen share sessions
A year ago…
Drawing the Calendar →
Sometime in the fall of last year I began to draw my calendar.
My weeks were packed with a series of interlocking jobs and I couldn’t keep them straight. Tiny calendars on my computer weren’t cutting it. I needed something tangible — I needed a calendar-as-artifact.
The drawn calendar is not for minutiae, but for overview, for the ability to both understand the rhythm of coming weeks at a glance, and for the pleasure of ticking off time.
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These links are our attempt at curating some of the UX content available online and giving it back to the community in a more structured and digestible way. Learn more about uxdesign.cc’s philosophy here.
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Fabricio Teixeira + Caio Braga
