💥Design Brief #78: Building Design Systems, Friction in UX, Learnability for Web Design and Sketch Library

How Building a Design System Empowers Your Team to Focus on People, Not Pixels

Two years ago, HubSpot decided to redesign their platform to deliver the promise of their brand better and to eliminate the inconsistencies in UI. In order to make their product consistent, highly functional and delightful, the team needed to create a design system. How did it go and how does the design system help create a unified user experience? Read more

Look at Your Product from a New Perspective

Skyscanner rewrote their Flights application from scratch in 2015. The overhaul proved to be a success in all markets but the Netherlands. Why didn’t Dutch users like the application redesign? Andrea Sipos, a Product Manager at Skyscanner Engineering, shares some insights on what went wrong and how they fixed the problem. Read more

Designing Friction for a Better User Experience

“In experience design, friction is anything that prevents users from accomplishing their goals or getting things done.” You might think that friction is always a bad thing in a product. In some cases, though, a product actually requires some friction. When is the use of friction justified and how to design it so that it can even improve the user experience? Read more

Air Lookout Is the Side Project That Changed My Design Process Forever

Geof Crowl, a freelance designer, shares a personal story on how designing one product changed his view on the process of design and development for every project he has worked on ever since. Air Lookout, the app that simplifies air quality information, wasn’t a particular success. However, the takeaways from the design process were priceless. Read more

Understanding Learnability for Web Design: Tips and Best Practices

Creating a clear user experience that visitors can quickly pick up and understand should be the goal of building a learnable website. It’s much easier with mobile apps, but websites can’t always offer lengthy tutorials. What’s the alternative? Learn the best practices for creating a website that users will find convenient to use. Read more

No More FAQs: Create Purposeful Information for a More Effective User Experience

Creating effective user information – even when using the apparently simple Q&A format – is complex and requires careful planning. That’s why the widely-used FAQ format often misses the mark and doesn’t provide information in a way a user expects. Purpose information is a more efficient alternative. What’s behind this term and how to implement it? Read more

Building Our Sketch Library

Version 47 of Sketch saw the long-awaited introduction of Libraries, a functionality that allows you to sync your symbols globally across all your Sketch files. The Product Design Team at Hudl shares the lessons learned and decisions made after putting their design system into a Library. What can you take away from their experiences? Read more

Dribbble 2017 Year in Review. Netguru’s Trello Redesign Hits the Top!

At the beginning of every year, Dribbble publishes a review with the most popular shots from each year. The team picks only a few dozen projects from over 640k shots of amazing designers’ work. The Netguru’s Trello Redesign concept made it to the top of the list! Could we be any prouder of our Product Design Team? Read more

Designers Who Play with Words

Design isn’t only about visuals anymore. Writing has gained a lot of traction lately as a critical skill in the this area. Melody Quintana, an experienced designer and writer from Dropbox, shares some ways of how to use writing in a design process and also suggests lightweight, playful exercises that will get the words flowing. Read more