What nobody told me about the ‘Etiquette’

Recently I’ve been interviewing a lot of junior UX designers for roles in London and Paris. Some are clearly ‘in the know’ — I can tell that they’ve been coached by their family, school, or network. Others are quite clueless about how to get hired.

I totally relate to this second group of people. I started my career not in tech but in investment banking, and I also had a lot of the same misconceptions.

Here are 11 lessons, from over 10 years of reflection and interviewing 🙌!

Note: this originated as a thread on Twitter. Here I’m expanding a little more on each bit.

I was laying in bed last night scrolling through Instagram like a zombie, like we all do.

Eyes half open, struggling hard to keep a tight grasp on my phone, ears hurting like bruised peaches because of my generic, hard as a hammer earphones.

But then I saw something that turned my mindless scrolling into something fruitful.

It was a clip from the show “Young Sheldon”. Georgie is inspired to get rich, the quick way.

He goes to a card store’s “going out of business sale” and bargains with the lady behind the counter to give him 52 Texas snow globes for $35.

Today’s world entirely relies on the web. Users are on the web all the time for googling every small unknown thing or doing online shopping. Interactive and engaging design is what every website owner needs. Earlier marketers used to worry about generating traffic to the content, but now the entire battle lies in holding users’ time span.

Motion is the ultimate solution to overcome the boring UI with different elements like fonts, colors, and icons. There is a need for motion that will support the essence of real-time interaction. Users will experience the emotional benefits and relate it to a physical object in real life.

In this article, I explore possibilities on how to improve in-moment experiences converging physical and online shopping.

Have you ever been in a shop and waited too long to ask a simple question about some trousers that you like, like size or color availability? Have you ever walked at night in a shopping street and fell in love with a product in a shop window?

Imagine being able to scan a code and access directly to the product information, be able to check product availability, and order it without having to walk into a shop. All this without having to download a company app — all this is possible with App Clip.

But it might be worthwhile

8 am. The alarm goes on. My morning routine begins.

Following the crazy advice of Wim Hoff, also known as the “Ice Man”, I go into the bathroom for the ritual. Every single cell in my organism is fighting against my will of taking that cold shower.

I pull the trigger. A Waterfall of tiny little needles comes down at me. For the first ten seconds, I’m going through hell. Slowly, with the help of deep breaths and a calm attitude, the temperature of my body starts balancing itself.

After this uncomfortable moment, I find myself enjoying the feeling of blood circulation through my whole body. It feels refreshing.

My first real project after graduating from design school in 2008 was map designing.

Designing a Map for UNESCO World Heritage Site, The Qutab Minar Complex. An initiative for the appreciation of historical monuments of Delhi, India.

Problem most Indian heritage sites face.

• The lack of good maps,
• inaccurate information,
• stories made up by local guides and tout
• defaced plaques/plates
• bad basic infrastructure

These often welcomes tourists to most Indian heritage sites. Much of Delhi’s history is in crowded complexes that have numerous buildings as dynasties have built new structures beside and over older ones. But lack of proper information is just making them hollow monuments.

The two areas share a lot in common and knowing how to make them work together can lead to rich and actionable insights

UX research and analytics are two relatively young professional niches that involve data, analysis, and deriving insights, and many people get confused about the difference between the two. I’m one of the lucky people who had the opportunity to work in both fields, and the more experience I gain, the better I understand the potential of deriving rich and actionable insights when professionals from the two areas work together towards a common goal.

“Work from home,” what an intriguing concept. Until now, we’ve always structured “work” to exist separately from our personal life. One should not bleed into another. We accomplished this by physically segregating work from everything else. However, with the pandemic compelling many to work from home, this physical boundary has ceased to exist. We now have to unlearn a lot of what we knew before and learn new ways to adapt to this way of life.

With so many tools available today (Google Forms, Typeform, Survey Monkey, etc.), creating and distributing a customer survey can be cost effective and fast, but make no mistake, a survey is still a design activity. Crafting a survey requires planning and thoughtful decision making. Understanding the goals of the survey, the mode, and the population/users you are interested in is key. Without proper execution your survey can quickly become ineffective and biased.

Here are 10 ways you might just be ruining your survey

UX: Designing for Advantage

The five types of product advantages and how to leverage each one for greater success in the open market.

What really constitutes an advantage?

When we talk about advantages in a product or service, we are generally referring to what makes one thing ‘better’ than another. This is almost always done by subjective comparison, by feel, and is established without real consideration to what is actually creating that perceived advantage.

Make no mistake, advantages are almost always based on perception, but perceptions are almost always based on something that is perceived. That is to say that Mercedes, Rolex, Pepsi, Apple all carry with them different advantages that are associated with their respective brands.

This constraint in communication actually facilitates it.

Designers, the world over, believe they are God’s gift to mankind. Designers believe without us taking objects, products & services, or arts & crafts, and making them better, evolving them, or re-shaping them in our image, the world will spin off its axis. Call it pretentious self-importance or an innate ability to overestimate ones own self-worth, we believe we’re the bee’s knees and no amount of 3M post-it notes would convince us otherwise.

UI & UX Design Inspiration

Every day most digital designers look for inspiration on sources like Dribbble. In a large stream of the works, it is very easy to miss some quality shots with small number of likes and comments.

We decided to change that and every week showcase some of the recent cool shots of young designers who didn’t get much attention of the community. Here they are:

VOLT — MULTI-DIRECTIONAL MAP
👨‍🎨 Jurre Houtkamp Jurre Houtkamp
👥 Framer

BETSWIPE SPORTS BETTING APPLICATION
👨‍🎨 hexagon.agency

Part 3 of 3 — Support and representation

Welcome to the final part of this three-part series which aims to provide guidance on topics you may wish to explore during your interview process when considering joining a large corporation for the first time within a UX leadership role.

This week we shall take a look at the importance of senior leadership representation for your discipline within the corporation and how at this early stage you might identify the extent that it exists.

Kids and adults are becoming more and more techno-savvy, especially the kids who are used to all kinds of gadgets from a very small age. Taking it into account and seeing how many educational solutions are there on the market already, it makes sense that the process of e-learning app design is getting harder. Though more often than not designers follow the same guidelines they do when creating apps for other industries, what’s important is to pay special attention to where those principles differ, affected by the intricacies of apps that are intended for studying and teaching.

The customer will give you the feedback you want

You have an idea and you plan to bring it to life. You started with the customer’s needs and problems. How do you design the simplest product to meet these needs? Many initiatives start with the idea of designing this simple product. The development process can take years, sometimes in startups. Here, the lean startup technique can be your guide.

According to Eric Ries, the father of this technique, it is unnecessary to waste time on the business plan and wait for perfection. Ries, mentions a few fundamentals in his book. Accordingly, when starting the enterprise, the focus should be on sales instead of details. The product development process should be shortened. Initiatives that focus on customers achieve success by developing their products according to user comments. The main reason for the failure of the attempts is the lack of these substances.

Introduction

Daily we are using the e-commerce/food ordering/delivery companies to order needful items and get it delivered to our doorstep in a day or two but what we don’t pay attention to are those people who are making this delivery possible even in harsh conditions like scorching heat of summer, the chilling cold of winter or the rainy season. But there are many problems, faced by these individuals which we are unaware of.
This article, through a series of steps, explains my endeavour to make an app for delivery agents. In this article, I write the complete process i.e. from pen and paper research to UI Screens of the app with UX methods that are necessary for providing the best possible user experience.

Looking for a great agile project management tool but baffled by the variety available? Here are the tools you and your team should be considering for your next project!

Agile gets the job done. It brings teams together and boosts communication. It also challenges teams. In the fall, when trees come under duress, leaves produce some of their most splendid colors in the whole year.

In a similar sense, the agile methodology brings out the best in teams as it forces them to do the research and the testing first, making it a truly user-centric method of development. Successful products that are a hit with their users means happier teams and less headaches down the line.

Having the right diagram tool can make a huge difference in any design project. But which tools do designers love? Find the top diagram tools in this post!

Designing a product involves a lot of boxes to check, especially in cases where the product hosts a lot of content in hierarchical structures. Many design teams use diagrams to explore new ideas, design hierarchy in products, illustrate user paths and much more.

Diagramming can be a powerful way to get a snapshot of the entire problem or the whole solution. It can give us context and help us avoid mistakes down the road, or help an outsider understand design concepts. But precisely because it’s so versatile and useful, there’s an abundance of diagram tools out there.

What I Wish I Knew About Developing an Information Architecture

7 lessons learned from card sorting and tree testing on complex corporate intranets and Saas

When I first learned about card sorting as a method to help organize information architecture (IA) of a website or app, I assumed the method is very simple and easy — just create the cards, ask users to sort them into groups, then presto!

But was I naive, was I wrong! There actually is a lot more complexity behind a seemingly straightforward card sorting. It is especially more complicated when it comes to organizing the information architecture for corporate intranets and Saas (Software as a service) of complex business and industry.

Responsive web design helps create seamless user experiences across all platforms and devices. Here are 5 best practices and 30 responsive website examples.

Responsive design should be standard practice for UX designers. Designing great user experiences for your users means that you must provide a seamless experience that meets their needs — and those needs can change depending on the device they’re using.

That’s why getting your head around all things responsive web design can inspire you to create better designs for the people who matter most: your users.