💥Design Brief #84: Experimental Design, Microcopy, Qualities of a Great Junior Team Member, Desktop Prototyping, Cheating at Design and Conversational UI for Amazon’s Alexa

An Ode to Experimental Design

Learn the whole truth about testing in design. Jonas Downey, a designer at Basecamp, spent most of the last year testing dozens of conversion-related design ideas. What was the most interesting part of the process? And what has he learned about experimental design? Read more

When Great Product Teams Ship Broken UX: 4 Steps to Mind the Gap

Many well-funded companies with ample resources often ship broken user experiences. The author proposes some tactics and tools to radically refocus even a large organization around user experience. The presented method is repeatable and will work anywhere. As a bonus, you’ll get a template to give you a head start. Read more

Getting Your Feet Wet with Microcopy

When it comes designing content, you have to make sure that the words you choose to put in the project focus on the success of the end user. This is where microcopy comes in. The author goes through a few things to help you write better microcopy for your idea. Read more

7 Practical Tips for Cheating at Design

Every web developer inevitably runs into situations where they need to make visual design decisions. There are a ton of tricks you can use to level up your design that don’t require a background in graphic design. With some simple tweaks you can significantly improve user experience on your website or app. Read more

How to Be a Great Junior Team Member

Starting your first real job might be a bit of an overwhelming experience. To make it a bit smoother and even more fun, here are a few tips on how to actually make it work. This article is a must-read for all the beginners who are just joining a new team. Read more

Learning the Basics of Conversational UIs with a UX Designer for Amazon’s Alexa

Angela Nguyen is a UX designer at Amazon, working on the Alexa Team. She has vast experience in creating conversational UIs. In this interview, she shares details about her daily work and sheds light on how the Amazon team designs conversational UIs for their devices. Read more

Desktop Prototyping

At Dropbox, they design many interfaces that users experience on their desktop computers. What’s special about desktop design is that we can’t predict what the user’s screen will look like . The user’s environment is usually a busy, distraction-prone space. How do you prototype for such an environment? Read more