💥Design Brief #117: Gamification in UX, Mosaic Design System, Designer’s vs. Client’s Morals, Segmenting Your SaaS Landing Page, and Just-In-Time Design

How—and When—to Use Gamification in Your UX

Gamification — the practice of incorporating features commonly found in video games into products and apps to increase engagement— is becoming an increasingly commonplace technique in product design. For UX practitioners it is a powerful tool to keep users engaged and make them come back for more. However, if implemented poorly, it can frustrate users, distract from the core features of our products, and even encourage potentially harmful addictive behaviors. Truly understanding users' motivations is crucial to successfully leveraging gamification in our UX and our products. Read more

Efficient Consistency with the Mosaic Design System

The Mosaic Design System is made up of ideas, processes, patterns, principles, and tools. It was made to improve the workflow of the TeleTracking Technologies design team and it worked perfectly. It turned out to be a living solution allowing their UIs to stay consistent across Design and Engineering. They can update multiple products and all their designer files with just one change. Learn how in their case study. Read more

Design Debate: Is It Important That a Designer Agrees with Their Client’s Morals?

In the newest design debate on 99u, Meredith Hattam, Steven Heller, and Lina Forsgren weigh in on whether you need to agree with the morals of your clients in order to do the job. They argue that there are many wonderful, sustainable brands, but it’s very hard to find a company that produces products that are 100 percent ethical and sustainable. And that it is an even greater challenge to put ethics first as a freelance designer. How to stay true to your principles and make ends meet? Read more

How to Segment Your SaaS Landing Page to Convert Everyone

If you can target your SaaS landing page towards more than 1 persona or 1 niche that could benefit from your product, then there's a huge potential for generating a ton of revenue. How? Learn more about the three step process of converting all of your personas/archetypes into customers from marketer and designer Pedro Cortes. Read more

How to Organize Design Teams and Promote Design Culture

In this podcast you can listen to Christian Hertlein, the head of design at N26, a mobile bank startup with over 1 million customers across 17 European markets. A year ago, Christian took over a team of designers in a super fast growing startup and started integrating design across different departments and promoting design as an important part of the culture. Read more

Just-In-Time Design

The disconnect between designers and engineers is a common source of frustration in any product-focused company. This is because designers are often working at least one sprint ahead of engineers. While one sprint might not seem like much of a lag, a typical product team learns a lot after the design hand-off. In his article Matthew Ström, a designer and a developer, argues that instead of working ahead, we should finish designing as close to the end of a sprint as possible. He calls the practice just-in-time design. This approach shift will eventually improve the quality of the product. Read more