💥Design Brief #109: Competitor Reviews, Effective Product Discovery, Proactive UX Design, Onboarding Users, Web & Mobile Forms and Slow Design

A UXers Guide to Competitor Reviews

A competitor review is an essential step towards good UX design. Not only can it provide design inspiration, but it is also important to get an idea of the range of alternative products and services that are open to users. This short guide outlines some hints and tips for carrying out competitor reviews and some things to think about to get the most out of this invaluable UX activity. Read more

6 Guiding Principles for Effective Product Discovery

Teresa Torres and Jeff Merrell teach business leaders and change agents how to prototype their way to viable solutions at Northwestern. For the final assignment, they asked students to reflect on the overall design process. When writing this assignment, Jeff distilled design process down to six key principles that perfectly summarized what matters in discovery. Read more

Proactive UX Design: A Big Leap Requiring Baby Steps

When teams engage in proactive user experience design, they deliver better products. Proactive UX design tackles the bigger challenges faced by the product’s users. Here is why everyone benefits from taking the time and pushing the organization in the direction of becoming more proactive. Read more

Animating on a Schedule

Nick Butcher, Android designer and developer at Google shares some insights from working on the Google I/O 2018 Android app. Google I/O 2018 Android app is a conference companion app that allows attendees and remote folks to find sessions, build a personalized schedule, and reserve seats at the venue. Here’s how the team used animations that greatly enhanced the experience. Read more

Onboarding Users Of Your Product: From Trial To Payment

After speaking about the attraction phase of the customer lifecycle, Joe Leech takes a closer look at the second phase, activation, which includes signing up, onboarding users, and asking for payment. Onboarding is a real challenge, because it can be complex and make the user enter personal information. How can you help users to sign up, onboard, and pay for your product? Read more

The System Always Kicks Back

Kyle Peatt works as an Interaction Design and Front-End Developer at Shopify. Last year, the company launched Polaris, a product design system. They poured a lot of energy and thought into how to get the system adopted, how to incentivize its usage, and how to make it great. Here’s a piece about the journey to building Polaris, about the biggest surprises and the major challenges. Read more

Simple Rules for Designing Web & Mobile Forms

Forms facilitate online communication and enable commerce. They allow businesses to collect information and aggregate value. Many form standards are making their way into AR, VR, and MR applications. Forms should be designed well – here are a couple notes and observations on how to do it. Read more

The Case for Slow Design

Designers often find themselves saddled with impossible deadlines that require them to compromise on features and details. Their work is driven by the invisible hand of the market, which relentlessly demands getting a product out – not making it perfect. However, somewhere in the industrialized rush, designers have lost their sense of craftsmanship. To succeed in the future, they’ll need to find it again. Read more