💥Design Brief #72: Psychology in UX, Form Design, Imbalanced Layouts, UX Mapping, UX Research and Designing at Intercom

Welcome to the 72nd edition of Design Brief – our weekly selection of news and tips from the design world.

Are You Fooling Around with UX?

Things to remember while designing UX from a slightly different perspective. A non-designer from Quovantis shares her observations and insights she learned from working in a designer environment. Here are five things that separate good design from bad design. Read more

UX & Psychology Go Hand in Hand

With today's advanced technology, it’s crucial that designers understand the needs and behaviours of their users. It’s essential if they want to serve users better. Some fundamental psychological principles come in handy when you build UX. In this article, the author discusses the Gestalt theory. What is it and how can you leverage it in your work? Read more

Imbalanced Layouts Offer Different Patterns to Adopt

For a long time, balance, proportion, and symmetry in web interfaces were considered to be the signs of good taste and attributes of great design. The situation has changed. These days, we are witnessing another attempt to turn chaos into an advantage, represented by imbalanced layouts and compositions. How to create an imbalanced layout that won’t lead to a design disaster? Read more

3 Best Form Design Practices for Your Design Process

Forms are part and parcel of our everyday life, and, unfortunately, they aren’t always the best of experiences. Whether you’re booking your flight ticket or checking out items for your shopping cart, you often wish that forms could be designed just a little bit better. Here are three fundamental form design practices and insights for designers and business people. Read more

UX Mapping Methods Compared: A Cheat Sheet

“Empathy maps, customer journey maps, experience maps, and service blueprints depict different processes and have different goals, yet they all build common ground within an organization.” Combining all the four mapping methods will help you create an in-depth understanding of your users and your organization. How to use them? Read more

When to Redesign Your Legacy System

Your app evolves with time. You add new features, the user base grows, and their expectations are also greater. Usually, after some time, a question pops up in your head: “Do I need to consider running a full redesign?” There are many factors that should determine your decision, and this piece will help you find the answer. Read more

How to Stop UX Research Being a Blocker

“At its best, UX research surfaces insights and enables progress; at its worst it just gets in the way.” The biggest objection to conducting UX research is the lack of time. However, with such an approach you might miss out on very important things about your users and, as a result, build a product that won’t fit the audience. What approach should you take to stop UX research being a blocker? Read more

A Better Brand Sprint

Creating a brand is part of the process of launching a scalable product into the market, from ideation to production. Alex Tomlinson, a Product Designer at Founders Factory, shares four steps of building a beautiful brand identity that will live with the product through its launch and hopefully grow with the company over the first two or three years. Read more

Behind the Design Work of Building Intercom

“When designing for a specific audience, the challenge lies in not reducing that audience down to a trope.” On Wednesday, November 29, Intercom hosted ‘Building Intercom,’ a unique engineering event. Kyle Benson, a Brand Designer, shares the process of how they created a unique visual identity for the event page, including printed materials, ads, and speaker slide templates. Read more