The humanity of Blockchain, Wordle UX, web3 painpoints, free UI loaders

Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.

“In Agile, discovery is assumed. At a minimum, you need a rough spec and some goals to get started. But is the spec validated against business goals or user needs? Is this the best solution? If so, when does that discovery work happen? Not during Agile development.”

Is Agile an anti-design pattern? →
By Shamsi Brinn

The UX Collective is an independent ad-free design publication that elevates unheard design voices, reaching over 500k+ designers every week. Join our community on Twitter.

Editors’ picks

• Web3 painpoints →
  Why blockchain and web3 user interfaces will suck for a while.
  By Tamara Adlin
• 0 to 1 →
  Designing big, complex products from scratch.
  By Jake Rich
• The humanity of Blockchain →
  Collaboration, contracts, and the tyranny of platforms.
  By The Gouverneur

Mind the ‘Uuh’ — this device will train you to avoid using filler words.

Make me think

• What if… one day everything got better? →
  “Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) this year is on May 19, 2022. I can’t think of a better day. That gives you or your company about 6+ weeks to land some minor fixes on your homepages.”
• Reducing Slack’s memory footprint →
  “Slack’s desktop client can use a lot of memory. This memory footprint increases as the user signs into more teams, as each team runs in its own webview. More memory usage means worse performance, degrading our customer’s experience of Slack and their other applications.”
• Be the browser’s mentor, not its micromanager. →
  “Give the browser some solid rules and hints, then let it make the right decisions for the people that visit it, based on their device, connection quality and capabilities. This is how they will get a genuinely great user experience, rather than a fragmented, broken one.”

Little gems this week

Multipliers and thunder thieves: two opposite forces in companies →
By Kike Peña

Wordle is a masterclass in product design simplicity →
By Chris Nielsen

Your Personal Slot Machine — How design can hack your brain →
By Josep Ferrer

Tools and resources

• Free UI loaders →
  Free loaders & spinners for your next project.
• Iconer →
  Customize and download any icon.
• Web3 UX fundamentals →
  Designing web3 experiences for the average human.

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. So we created the design newsletter we have always wanted to receive. Feel free to forward this to your friends.