💥Design Brief #94: Priority Guides, Imperfect Design, Unexpected User Behaviours, Optical Adjustments in Components and Principle-led Product Development

Priority Guides: A Content-First Alternative to Wireframes

If you’ve ever been involved in a digital design project, chances are you’re familiar with wireframes, one of the most popular and widely used tools for designing websites, apps, dashboards, and other digital user interfaces. But they do have some problems. The author proposes an alternative: the priority guide, which avoids the drawbacks of wireframes. Read more

Imperfect, Organic Design Is the Next Step

If you look around, you’ll probably realise that we are seeking Pixel Perfection in most of our websites and mobile applications. Designers are obsessed with creating Pixel Perfect products. Is it the right way to go? Here is how we got to this point and how ‘imperfections’ can actually make our designs more human and inclusive. Read more

Design for Unanticipated User Behaviours

To stay relevant in the development of digital products, designers need to think at a higher level than screens or sites or devices. They should be able to anticipate unexpected user behaviours and design not just responsive interfaces, but also responsive experiences. Here are some tips on how to do it right. Read more

Customer Retention Is the New Conversion

Convincing potential users to sign up for your product isn’t easy. But what happens next is far more important. Check out the recap of a speech Dres Traynor, Intercom’s co-founder and CSO, gave during the Traction Conference. He talks about customer retention and how to build onboarding based on your customers’ goals, and why when your product improves, your onboarding must improve with it. Read more

Optical Adjustments in Components

Every time you look at a computer interface, your brain is trying to fool you. No matter how hard you try to make things look aligned  –  the eye of the beholder will often disagree due to the way we are wired to perceive objects in real life. As designers, the only option we have is to fool viewer’s brain back. Here are a few things to compensate for when designing components. Read more

10 Principles for Good UX Design Documentation

Being part of the unique organisational set-up at Canonical and having created software that has a truly global impact led Marc Oliver to rethink and redesign his UX design documentation. He has uncovered better ways of developing important UX design and research documentation for distributed teams. Here are ten principles everyone can adopt in this area. Read more

Principle-led Product Development

Many products start as an itch that we need to scratch – a frustration or a problem we’d like to see removed from our lives. But there are many ways to develop any type of digital product. You can ensure the success of the product development effort by starting not just with the problem to be solved, but also a short list of product principles that guide and inform the effort along the way. Here is how principle-led product development should be done. Read more