💥Design Brief #125: Dreams, Deadlines and a Design System, Development Fundamentals, Google Translate - Success in a Failure, the Perfect Charts, and Humans in Users

Of Dreams, Deadlines and a Design System

From 18 products, 300 sketch files, and 1,200 artboards to 200 unique components, the author describes how they developed Asphalt  —  GOJEK’s Design Language System (DLS) — and what they learned on the way. GOJEK has scaled 6600 times in since the launch of its mobile app in June 2015. Such a rapid growth put the engineering, operations and marketing teams under tremendous pressure. Design was no exception. They had to face problems like internationalization of the UI, removing unwanted assets from the code, and exporting multi-resolution assets. Read more

Development Fundamentals for UX Designers

Why is it important to understand development aspects, technical constraints & collaborate with developers? If you are a UX designer (interaction designer, product designer, service designer, UI designer  etc.), you are probably working on digital products or services. In other words, you are creating software products and contribute to a software development process. And to make informed design decisions, you have to cooperate closely with developers.
By reading this article you can learn about the technical limitations & development aspects, which means that you’ll be able to include a valuable additional layer in your design work & collaborate with developers more effectively. Read more

How We Succeeded by Failing to Redesign Google Translate — a UX Case Study

Nobody can deny that the technology behind Translate is unparalleled, but there are some UX issues which could be solved. “On the first glance of the current app, a redesign looked simple and quick - says a product designer Sahil Dav. But we couldn’t be more wrong. We just scratched the surface. There was a certain complexity in the simplicity and we missed it. We needed the fail to see things clearly.” Now, instead of just redesigning Google Translate, they are working on the product as a whole. Read more

Design Checklist for the Perfect Charts

Many applications use graphic elements to simplify numeric information. It is a straightforward and user-friendly solution. Designers adore charts too. There is so much space for creativity and self-expression when using these visual elements. But, to quote Steve Jobs: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” So, how to do it right? Read more

Humans, not Users

What makes the difference between a good digital product and a great digital product? Two letters: UX. User Experience Design. But there is a certain problem with that. “User experience design has led us to use a certain vocabulary - says designer Johannes Ippen - instead of seeing human beings with goals and attitudes, we see users. We use words like subscribers, subs, visitors, spenders, whales or even just “traffic” or “installs” to refer to them. We assign a role to them. UX design dehumanizes people.” So how to create Human Experiences instead of User Experiences? Read more