💥Design Brief #120: The State of UX in 2019, Growth Experiments, How to Resolve UX Debt, the Shopify App Store Redesign, Three vs. One Design Option

Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Baraga have published an annual report with a holistic analysis of UX Design as a discipline. They had a look at the tools used by designers, the methods they apply every day, the technologies they design around, the career challenges they experience, and how the designers’ community is responsible for what's happening in the world around us — the world that they, consciously or not, have helped to design. "We are looking forward to seeing how design will evolve in 2019. Meanwhile, here is our review of the past and analysis of the present, with an ever-watchful eye on the future of UX", begin the authors of the analysis. Read more

When Speeding up Means Slowing Down

“To be effective, do growth teams have to always be working rapidly: iterating, shipping and moving to the next “win”?”, asks Constance Wellman, a product designer at Dropbox and shares Dropbox’s lessons on running thoughtful growth experiments. Wellman claims that knowing when to move quickly and, on the other hand, finding the moments to move more thoughtfully has helped them build more successful experiments. This has resulted in a better, more cohesive experience for their users. Read more

UX Debt: How to Identify, Prioritize, and Resolve

UX debt can accumulate in any project, regardless of the development methodology employed, and too much of it will result in a loss of trust, traffic, and revenue. In this article, Anna Kaley from Nielsen Norman Group defines UX debt and shows how it can be identified; she also discusses methods for how to prioritize UX-debt issues and resolve them. UX debt isn’t always avoidable, but teams should organize and collaborate around how to address it before users start to notice. Read more

Redesigning the Shopify App Store: UX Challenges and Learnings

Since launching in 2009, the Shopify App Store has had more than 12 million app installs. It’s a critical place for business owners to find solutions for everything from sourcing products to marketing to fulfilling orders. By 2017, though, the Shopify App Store was starting to show its age. Trisha Causley shares how they managed to update the functionalities and remain of interest to their users. Read more

Stop Showing Design Options and Commit

A simple change of committing to one option, rather than trying to produce a variety of options to choose from in every task has accelerated and clarified our design process - says Rob McMakin from Slite - resulting in a big jump in the quality of design output. And although it is not a very welcomed method, as three design options is a standard clients got used to, it saves time of product teams and forces them to work more effectively. Having a designer work towards a three option review, and asking others to choose, doesn’t boost his expertise either, and it definitely doesn’t help to build mutual trust. Read more

What I Learned in Six Years at GDS

Anna Shipman, now a Technical Director for Customer Products at the Financial Times, shares her experience on what she learned when working for the UK government at the Government Digital Service. She emphasises that the guiding principles that helped them deliver great products can be encapsulated by the three things: think about what the user needs, make things open, and do the hard work to make it simple. Read more