By Melissa Belongea, Content Strategist, YML

January 21, 2021

It’s 2021 and whether you believe in placebos or the positioning of the sun, the turn of a calendar year is a great excuse to breathe in fresh air. Especially after the past twelve months, what some might consider a breaking point — large shifts to daily life, historical social and civic unrest, extreme weather events, a highly consequential election cycle, and shaky transitions of leadership. Yeah, things are certainly progressing quickly, and we couldn’t be more excited.

As builders of technology products in a design-driven agency, we are constantly negotiating current conditions with a future that is being created today.

How to Succeed as a Designer

Its has much less to do with skill and far more to do with attitude.

Overview

Throughout your career as a designer, you will face hardships. You will face setbacks. You will face things that catch you on the blindside and deal a decisive blow to your confidence, your morale, and sometimes even your livelihood.

In this age of swiftly shifting technology, requirements, and a thousand other things that come at you on a daily basis, the need to succeed is paramount.

Today, we’re going over exactly the mindset that you need to be successful in a world that is actively looking to outpace, outmatch, and defeat you.

Trends! Trends! TRENDS!

Experimenting with Neumorphism

Trends are cool. We get to experiment… try out new things, open new windows… (from which we sometimes wish we could jump off…)

…

All jokes aside…

Neumorphism ❤

There has been a lot of criticism, some from people that just don’t like it visually and others that don’t think it complies with accessibility. This trend has been widely analyzed and a lot has been written on how to generate elements and how to use them in different situations.

As designers, we can experiment as much as we want and I believe it is our duty to do so. It is important to push boundaries and see how far we can go… See if some new doors open in the way and knowing which ones we need to close again.

There’s a lot about this field you don’t learn in design school.

Many of us have gotten into UX design through other avenues. Most of my coworkers were artists, graphic designers, social media content creators, or web designers. Learning User Experience design at the educational level is still fairly new, especially in traditional colleges and universities. My educational background is Communications and Media Design. I didn’t study Human-Computer Interaction or anything directly related to UX design.

Because of this, much of the learning we’ll do as UX designers happens once we’re on the job.

1. You never really “own” a project.

In design school, when you’re tasked with a project, it’s yours.

Create a high-level homepage design and boost your chances to triple the revenue

The homepage is the eCommerce front door, even though there are some users that probably won’t land in a virtual store through the homepage, some users will.

Combining with the header, it should simultaneously inspire users to explore the content, promote products and campaigns and transmit the brand’s values. Its role is vital for the website, the “secret sauce” of a successful homepage is a good balance of the elements.

Fact is, the homepage must make clear to the user what the eCommerce offers and why making the purchase there is the best option.

The purpose of the site should be to solve problems, not to create more.

In 2013 I experienced the first depression in my professional career. In pursuit of a better life, I had emigrated from Iran to Europe. It was a brave move, but one of uncertainty and without any financial support to fall back on if things went wrong. I had joined a start-up in Berlin and, five months into the job, was told the company had gone bust. That was it.

You can imagine how I may have felt. I was a young and ambitious designer, embarking on a new chapter only to discover I had joined a sinking ship. After barely finding my feet in a new city, here I was, without any security and searching for a new opportunity.

A short guide on how to identify, that you need to make a complete visual refreshment to make your business grow

C: The time has come and now I know, that we need a full redesign.

TR: Okay, cool! When was your current design created and if you’re planning to add new functionality to the app?

C: Yes, of course! We’ve invented 3 new features and now we’re ready to change the design, that was created 5 years ago.

The redesign is a very individual service, but most of the people usually either wait too long before making a redesign (and this waiting can be critical, especially if we’re talking about mobile and web apps) or can’t stop making redesigns, that also influences user behavior and brand development not in the best way. That’s why we’ve decided to write about 5 sings, that can help you catch “just the right moment” to make a UI/UX refreshment.

Context

I tried to use both the web & mobile versions of Samsung’s community platform, called Samsung Members.
I discovered lots of usability issues, inconsistencies, design patterns used inappropriately and flows that did not make any sense to me, as a new user.

Disclaimer: This is an unsolicited design proposal. I did not have access to any user insights or analytics.

If this were a real redesign process, I would have find solutions for the problems users are facing AND measure the success. I would have looked at the results before and after, tracked relevant metrics and watched the product improve while connecting the design solutions to the needs of the business.

16 must-know UX Acronyms

Acronyms show up everywhere — in meetings, reports, and conversations.

I’ve found that learning UX acronyms not only helps when communicating to stakeholders within organizations, but they help to better understand a broader landscape of business, product management, and UX on a larger scale.

1. A/B Testing

A and B simply refers to showing two variants of the same web page/app and comparing which variant performs better.

2. CRM

Customer relationship management software gathers customer interactions across all channels into one place.

3. CSS

Cascading Style Sheets; describes how HTML elements are to be displayed on the screen, on paper, or in other media.

Creating a user persona can be a little complicated, especially if you’re new to this. I remember the first time I heard about creating a persona — it seemed funny, futile, and daunting at the same time. How am I going to get into the heads of the audience? How do I know what they want? Does this even work? Well, the short answers to these questions are: you can with some effort, that’s where research comes in, and it works all the time.

UI/UX: How to Make Real Money as a Designer

The secret that I wish someone would’ve told me when I was starting out.

Overview

This is by far THE most asked question that I get on a regular basis:

“Nick, how do I make money as a designer? Can I earn a living?”

The answer to that is yes, and whole hell of a lot more than that, but only if you understand how your profession works within the scope of the greater economy.

Today, I am going to spill the beans on my legit, no B.S. formula for how to make real, actual money as a designer.

The Formula

This is the formula making real money in almost any profession, doing almost anything, for almost anyone. Here it is:

Your income is directly dependent on your ability to produce value at scale with ownership.

Lessons from my Transition from School to the Real World

It’s been a little over four years since I graduated from the Design Leadership program at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and Maryland Institute College of Art. During the program, I took classes on Prototyping, Human Centered Design, Ethnography, Marketing, Consumer Behavior, and various other subjects within the design and business realm. When I graduated I thought I was the Business and Design Rambo and immediately accepted a position at USPS as a Product and Innovation Strategist. The real world humbled me. Here are 10 things I learned after graduating school:

The UX of Job Rejection Reversal

You don’t fail until you stop ⛔ trying.

It is common nowadays to apply for 100+ jobs, get interviewed by 20 companies, and then get offered ZERO or one job in the best scenarios. Just in this example, there are at least 5 /19 companies that might have been the candidate’s dream job company. The best part about these 19 companies is that the candidate got a face-to-face interview with one or more team members at these companies and then got rejected. These companies that shortlisted this candidate are different; they bet on the candidate and then decided to move in another direction. This means that with some effort, the candidate can open the opportunity door and get them interested again.

The noble task of deciding the options’ description and how to impact consumer choice with that.

Here is the third article in a series where I am exploring the architecture of choices. The first article gives you a hint about how this story began. The second article reviews the right number of options topic. In this article, you will find out how describing options’ attributes can influence the consumer decision.

Every coin has two sides

Now we live in an easy era. All can be done through the small device that we hold every day. In the past few years, various business models have emerged that make it easier for us to get things done, such as online shopping, ride-hailing, food deliveries, online billing, etc. All of these services can be paid for without using physical money, we no longer need to accept change in the form of candy. Transactions are carried out seamlessly. Of course, this is very beneficial for the user, but in terms of business, users are encouraged to be more consumptive and users are increasingly confused about controlling their expenses.

The Foremost Skill for UX-Designers and Researchers

As a User Experience Professional, we know all too well, that our primary USP, is our ability to Empathize with our target users and then design accordingly. Not only do we need to empathize with the users, but, we also, first, need to be able to understand ourselves, keep ourselves curious and motivated about our work, and be able to manage inter-personal relationships with deftness. In his seminal work, Daniel Goleman, masterfully, delves into the inner mechanics of brain’s architecture underlying emotions and rationality, and shows us, HOW MIGHT WE nurture and strengthen our emotional intelligence, to not only make us better and more successful professionals, but, also happier, mentally healthier and better human beings in general.

Therapist: So … what’s going on in your life?

Client: Not much, but what was his deal?

Therapist: Whose deal?

Client: The guy before me.

Therapist: How is that relevant to us?

Client: Well, knowing how he deals with his situation, I can do similar things and deal with my own situation, no?

Therapist: You know what? That actually makes a lot of sense. Let’s talk about his situation …

This conversation never happened in the history of therapy. During a therapy session, both parties know that each client’s challenges, and opportunities by which she can overcome her challenges, are highly contextual and specific to her lived experiences.

This list can be your best friend!

Looking for tips and tricks on your marketing strategies?

Here are 3 different lists of digital marketing courses that offer a ton of valuable information.

I like how they focus on skill-building.

If you’re interested in digital content marketing, this list can be your best friend!

You should bookmark this page for easy access.

Content Marketing Courses

And why they shouldn’t.

This article explores why the role of research shift as start-ups growth and mature and what they might be missing out on in the process. I argue why having research at the forefront of product development is always key when creating customer-centric products.

The beginning: Customer-centric start-ups

At the initial stages of any start-up, a couple of people come together because they believe they can solve a customer problem in an innovative way. This founding team often consists of two founders: one focussed developing the product and one focussed on selling the product.

I searched for must-read books on UX. There was a book I always put off: Laws of UX. I finally read it and realized that it is linked to other UX books. You can think of this article as a compilation of this book. Let’s not think about UX only for platforms such as web and mobile, and focus on the concept of ‘product’.

Focus on purpose

When users own a product, they want it to fulfill its function. So they simply want the product to do its core function. Therefore, eliminate extra processes that will tire the user. Briefly; do not distract the user.